Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant signed a law on May 22 that places significant restrictions on the way the state uses outside counsel. The state joined Arizona, Florida, and Indianaall of which have passed similar legislation aimed at curtailing big payouts for plaintiffs lawyers with strong ties to public officials. Mississippis Sunshine Act [PDF], which goes into effect July 1, allows the state attorney general to continue using outside firms, but it requires hired lawyers to provide written accounts of their time. Contingency agreements are also still permitted, but not before the AG makes a showing in writing that such a fee arrangement is both cost-effective and in the public interest. Significantly, the new law sets scaled percentage fee limitations on feeswith an absolute cap of $50 million. In a statement, the governor said the goal of the act is to make relationship between the state and its outside counsel more transparent. Transparency in government is critical to its integrity, said Bryant. Repeated attempts by Republicans in the state legislature to pass similar legislation had been shot down by Democratic lawmakers. But the GOP took control of the legislature in 2011 elections, paving the way for the bill to be signed by the Republican governor. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce praised the passage of the bill. In a statement, U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform president Lisa Rikard said that Mississippi took a significant step to rein in the troublesome practice of awarding contingency fee contracts to plaintiffs lawyers who are also major campaign contributors to the state attorney general. According to A Report On The Alliance Between State AGs And The Plaintiffs Bar 2011, a publication of Trial Lawyers Inc., Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, a Democrat, received the highest percentage (45 percent) of campaign funds from lawyers of any AG candidate between 2006-2010. Hood has been criticized for awarding vague contracts with no clear fee parameters. He approved $14 million in legal fees for the firm of Joey Langston, a lawyer who contributed about $150,000 to Hoods campaigns. Langstons firm, Langston & Lott, represented the state in a tax dispute with MCI. Rickard said that such pay-to-play schemes enrich lawyers at the expense of taxpayers and raise significant concerns about conflicts of interest, favoritism, the use of a public entity for personal gain, and fairness in prosecutions. But in an emailed statement, the public information officer from the AGs office said that its outside lawyers are hired based their filing of written requests. Lists are maintained by the AGs office of the order in which those requests are received. The AGs office says that the bill had nothing to do with transparency: The attorney generals office already makes contracts with outside firms available on its web site, requires lawyers to keep up with their hours, and its fee schedule was already set at a maximum of 25 percent. The spokesperson noted that voters had approved of how the state handles its litigation in the past seven or eight elections. In the past eight years, the office has recovered more than $600 million for our taxpayers from wrongdoers without costing the taxpayers one dime, she said. She said the real support for the bill came from huge corporate interests that did not like having to pay what they owed the taxpayers of Mississippi. Ahead of the bills passage, the attorney general issued a statement, urging voters to persuade lawmakers to reject it. He called the proposed law a short-sighted attempt to strip the people of a constitutionally empowered attorney general.