Twenty-five million dollars in legal fees were spent by Fair Fight Action, Stacey Abrams’ voting rights group over the past two years.
Of the $25 million, $9.5 million went to Allegra Lawrence-Hardy’s law firm – Lawrence-Hardy is the chair of Abrams’ campaign.
And Abrams and Lawrence-Hardy were also classmates at Spelman College.
The voting rights organization founded by Stacey Abrams spent more than $25 million over two years on legal fees, mostly on a single case, with the largest amount going to the self-described boutique law firm of the candidate’s campaign chairwoman.
Allegra Lawrence-Hardy, Abrams’ close friend who chaired her gubernatorial campaign both in 2018 and her current bid to unseat Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, is one of two named partners in Lawrence & Bundy, a small firm of fewer than two dozen attorneys.
The firm received $9.4 million from Abrams’ group, Fair Fight Action, in 2019 and 2020, the last years for which federal tax filings are available. Lawrence-Hardy declined to comment on how much her firm has collected from Fair Fight Action in 2021 and 2022 — years in which Fair Fight Action v. Raffensperger, for which Lawrence-Hardy was lead counsel, had most of its courtroom activity.
The payments came in in 2019 and 2020 – it is unclear how much the law firm received in 2021 and 2022 because federal tax filings are not yet available.
Allegra Lawrence-Hardy– who chaired both Abrams’ losing 2018 campaign for governor and her current run against incumbent Republican Brian Kemp — is one of two named partners in Lawrence & Bundy, which employs fewer than two dozen attorneys, and was lead counsel in the case Fair Fight Action v. Raffensperger, the report said.
It’s unclear how much Lawrence & Bundy was paid in 2021 and 2022 because the federal tax filings are unavailable and Lawrence-Hardy declined to comment to Politico about how much the law firm collected.
Fair Fight Action lost the lawsuit against Georgia.
Fair Fight Action lost the suit, but insisted it drew attention to voting inequities — while Politico noted it also galvanized the Democratic Party and many of its top donors.
The judge, Steve C. Jones, on Sept. 30 issued his final order and judgment, ruling against Fair Fight Action, Politico reported.
“Although Georgia’s election system is not perfect,” Jones wrote, “the challenged practices violate neither the constitution nor the [Voting Rights Act],” he wrote, Politico reported.
Is this legal?