10/13/02

A Plain Dealer review of 11,400 campaign contributions to Ohio Attorney General Betty Montgomery found that of the $2.6 million she received from individuals and political-action committees, about 30 percent are tied to private lawyers her office hires to do legal work for the state. Those contributions cover January 1998 through April 2002.

State law requires political campaigns to make their best effort to identify contributors' employers. And Montgomery has earned high marks for providing that information.

"She has gotten A's from us all the way back to '97, when we started giving grades for this," said Ohio Citizen Action's Patty Lynch.

Still, many contributors to Montgomery gave only generic information about their occupation and did not actually name their employer.

For example, lawyers at Squire, Sanders & Dempsey gave Montgomery $36,275 - more than all other law firms except one. But of the 101 contributions they made to the attorney general, fewer than half identified the law firm. In many cases, the employer was simply left blank or the contributor responded with the generic "attorney."

To identify lawyers who gave to Montgomery, the newspaper matched Montgomery's contributor list against a list of Ohio's licensed lawyers provided by the Ohio Supreme Court. The Plain Dealer identified contributions from family members by examining donations made from lawyers' home addresses.

- Dave Davis