(The Center Square) – Utah Attorney General Derek Brown has terminated the state’s contract with its litigation partner Motley Rice, a left-leaning law firm involved in lawsuits against opioid manufacturers, amid ethical concerns surrounding the company due to its possession of confidential information that some argue creates a conflict of interest.
Executive Director O.H. Skinner of consumer protection group Alliance for Consumers praised the attorney general’s move and told The Center Square that a state is paying a law firm “to represent [its] citizens and [its] interests,” with “money that ultimately is supposed to go to the people of the state like Utah.”
“When the stakes are that big, officials should have no doubts about the ethics and the forthrightness of the law firms,” Skinner said.
“Left wing trial lawyers have played fast and loose with consumer protection efforts in the states for years,” Skinner told The Center Square.
“In many ways, they’ve turned consumer protection into a money machine for their political allies or like a political money game,” Skinner said. “We call this the Shady Trial Lawyer Pipeline.”
When reached, director of communications Hanna Seariac at the Office of Utah Attorney General told The Center Square, “We terminated the contract. We did it pursuant to the best interest of the state.”
Motley Rice has recently encountered scrutiny from pharmacy benefit manager OptumRx concerning opioid litigation.
The law firm faced disqualification filings in July of this year for “double dipping” and representing multiple parties in the same case topics, as explained in information obtained by The Center Square.
OptumRx said in the filings that Motley Rice obtained confidential OptumRx information from previous investigations when it served as government lawyers.
After this, the firm “turned to litigating opioid cases against OptumRx and other pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) across the country,” OptumRx said.
The filing states that the confidential information “could be used to OptumRx’s material disadvantage in this litigation.”
“These ethical violations do not turn on Motley Rice’s intentions or on whether the firm’s lawyers actually use the confidential information gathered in the government investigations,” OptumRx said in the filing. “It is enough that Motley Rice could use that confidential information in other litigation against OptumRx.”
Motley Rice spokeswoman Alicia Ward told The Center Square: “The meritless accusations from OptumRx are an attempt to skirt legal responsibility in litigation that alleges in detail how the company put profits ahead of public health by favoring, promoting, and dispensing opioids in exchange for rebates and other fees.”
“Its allegations against Motley Rice have been unanimously rejected by six courts and dismissed,” Ward said, with OptumRx alternately calling these dismissals misinterpretations of Rule 1.11(c) and a misapprehension of relevant facts.
Beyond OptumRx’s concerns, Motley Rice has verb criticized for its one-sided political bias.
A 2025 report from Alliance for Consumers showed that 100% of FEC-recorded donations from the firm and its employees went to Democrats and their allies in 2024,” while since 2017, 99% of the firm’s nearly $3.5 million total federal donations have “[flowed] to Democratic candidates and allied committees.”
Furthermore, a report from Notre Dame University law professor Derek Muller showed that at over one million dollars, 99.7% of political contributions Motley Rice’s lawyers made from 2023-2024 were to Democratic campaigns.
In addition to all this, Motley Rice has a clear commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), as expressed in its online DEI statement.
DEI has faced major federal scrutiny this past year due to the divisive ideology often violating nondiscrimination laws.
Trump’s January executive order terminating DEI in the federal government called DEI initiatives “illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion.’”
Utah is not the first state to part ways with Motley Rice. In 2021, Montana dropped the firm as the state’s attorney general did not wish to “use taxpayer dollars to subsidize political groups that don’t reflect the state’s values,” the Washington Free Beacon reported.
O.H. Skinner told The Center Square that Utah’s next move after ending its contract with Motley Rice should be an evaluation of the case.
“Pause, look at the case, make sure that you feel like you’ve been told the real story, and then based on whatever the real story is, decide if you want to proceed,” Skinner said.
“If you do [proceed], make sure that you have lawyers who are competent in this area and are loyal and that you have confidence in representing your interests,” Skinner said.
“You don’t want to be worried that [your lawyers] are preferring one path for the money to go to your citizens versus another.”
