After the Midterms, New Democratic AGs Decide Who Gets Billion-Dollar State Cases

The 2026 state attorney general races just redrew the map for corporate enforcement and for the plaintiffs’ firms that states hire to do that work.

Democrats flipped five AG offices from Republican control on Nov. 3: Texas, Georgia, Ohio, Iowa and Kansas. The net gain inverts the national map to 29 Democratic and 22 Republican attorneys general, with 13 new AGs in all, according to a post-election analysis from Troutman Pepper Locke, which called it “the strongest Democratic down-ballot result in a generation.”

For the business of law, the bigger story is who gets paid. States hand their largest cases to private firms, often on contingency, and the incoming AGs will decide whether that pipeline narrows or reopens.

Where the Five Races Stand

Here is where each race stands:

• Texas. State Sen. Nathan Johnson beat state Sen. Mayes Middleton 52% to 46% for the seat Ken Paxton left to run for the U.S. Senate. Middleton conceded the next morning.
• Georgia. State Rep. Tanya Miller, a former federal prosecutor, defeated state Sen. Brian Strickland to succeed Chris Carr. She is the first Black woman elected to the office.
• Ohio. Columbus lawyer John Kulewicz holds a narrow lead over Republican Keith Faber, who conceded, but the race remains too close to call.
• Iowa. Democrat Nate defeated incumbent Brenna Bird, who conceded Nov. 4.
• Kansas. Democrat Chris defeated incumbent Kris Kobach by about 13,500 votes, according to the AP, which called the race Nov. 6.

The winners take office in January.

Why the Texas Flip Matters Most

Texas has long anchored Republican multistate litigation, according to Troutman, and Kansas has also held lead roles in Republican coalitions. Those coalitions coordinate investigations and lawsuits across states, so a change in Austin or Topeka changes the posture of cases far beyond Texas or Kansas.

“New AGs will not take office with a blank slate,” Troutman’s analysis notes. Each can continue, expand, settle, redirect or drop a pending matter. Virginia shows how fast that can happen: its new AG, Jay Jones, reversed the state’s position in more than a dozen federal cases in his first month.

The enforcement agenda is broad. Troutman expects new activity in six areas: technology and AI; consumer protection; privacy; health care; consumer financial services; and gambling and prediction markets. Willems has already said he wants to rebuild Iowa’s consumer protection division and create the state’s first dedicated wage enforcement unit. Miller has proposed a Small Business Protection Unit in Georgia.

Who Gets Paid

States hire outside firms to bring their biggest cases, and they often pay those firms a share of the recovery instead of an hourly fee.

Texas is the clearest example of how large that market has become. Paxton’s office approved 13 contingent-fee contracts from 2015 onward, the Texas Tribune reported. Under those deals, a firm collects either a percentage of the recovery or four times its hourly billings, whichever is less. In the state’s record $1.4 billion biometric privacy settlement with Meta, Texas paid $143 million to its two outside firms, Keller Postman and McKool Smith. Norton Rose Fulbright’s fees under its Google contracts could exceed $350 million.

Texas also makes these contracts easy to award. The state doesn’t require competitive bidding, according to the Tribune. The AG only has to notify the Legislature and certify that in-house or hourly lawyers can’t handle the work. That gives Johnson wide discretion over which firms get the state’s next big case.

The Backlash That Came First

Republican AGs had been using that discretion to cut plaintiffs’ firms loose, and two of the offices that just flipped led the way. In March 2023, Kobach ended Kansas’ contract with Morgan & Morgan on a natural gas price-gouging case, citing timeliness and communication problems. “This is all about politics,” founder John Morgan said, the Topeka Capital-Journal reported. The same month, Bird’s office terminated Iowa’s special counsel agreement with Morgan & Morgan and two Iowa firms in its tobacco case against Philip Morris after a court sent the claims to arbitration.

Other Republican AGs followed. Utah AG Derek Brown ended the state’s opioid contract with Motley Rice over concerns about confidential information, which the firm called “meritless.” Alaska AG Stephen Cox fired Motley Rice from opioid litigation and Baron & Budd from its PFAS case, citing conflicts of interest, according to Reporting From Alaska. Both firms disputed the reasons.

Outside pressure helped drive those decisions. The conservative Alliance for Consumers, led by Oramel H. Skinner III, has spent years pressing AGs to drop firms it calls part of a “Shady Trial Lawyer Pipeline,” pointing to their political donations. “When the stakes are that big, officials should have no doubts about the ethics and the forthrightness of the law firms,” Skinner said of the Utah decision.

Democratic AGs have faced the same fight. In California, a state employees union challenged Democratic AG Rob Bonta’s hiring of Lieff Cabraser for the state’s climate case against oil companies. A Sacramento County judge rejected the challenge in July 2025, siding with Bonta’s argument that the case needed specialized lawyers, E&E News reported.

What Comes Next

The new AGs take office in January, and the first signals will come before then. Here’s what to watch.

• Transition hires. Who leads each office’s consumer protection, antitrust and complex litigation divisions will say more about outside-counsel strategy than any campaign promise.
• Inherited contracts. Each new AG will review the outside-counsel agreements already in place. In Texas, that includes the contingency contracts behind the state’s tech cases. Expect early decisions on whether to renew, renegotiate or rebid them.
• Multistate coalitions. With Texas and Kansas changing hands, watch which coalitions lose a lead state and which gain one, and how quickly pending multistate cases shift position.
• Legislative pushback. Republican legislatures in Texas, Georgia, Ohio, Iowa and Kansas could move to restrict contingency-fee contracts by statute, setting up a fight between the new AGs and their statehouses.

Plaintiffs’ firms that want the next round of state work will need fee structures, conflict checks and political-donation records that can survive a public fight over who gets paid. As Troutman’s analysis puts it, “A speech signals interest; a filing shows how the office will use its authority.” The same test applies to outside-counsel contracts, and the signed engagement letters will show where the money goes.