AG Candidate Little’s Claims Don’t Square with Record

AG Candidate Little’s Claims Don’t Square with Record

Attorney General candidate Chris Little claims in his new television ad that he will protect Rhode Island consumers, but as a 30-year-plus attorney, he’s made a career out of defending corporations.

In his ad, Little, who is the Moderate Party candidate, says he will protect Rhode Islanders from the “bad guys in the board rooms, the utilities, and the health care system.” But records of past clients obtained by GoLocalProv show that his law firm, Little, Medeiros, Kinder, Bulman & Whitney PC, more often than not has been on the side of the “guys in the board rooms.”

Clients Include Fortune 500 Companies

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At least five of the clients are Fortune 500 companies: Allstate Insurance Company, General Motors, General Mills, IBM, and Viacom International, Inc. In addition, the client list includes at least five insurance companies, five health care-related businesses, four banks, and two utilities.

The list is available on an old, now-defunct version of his firm’s Web site. GoLocalProv obtained access to the old site using the Wayback Machine, an Internet archiving service. Little said the old site was taken down before he announced his run for Attorney General in February 2010.

One client, the Baltimore Gas & Electric Co., was named Maryland’s likely top polluter in 1999, after releasing more than 14 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the air. Another client, the Rohm & Haas Company, was accused of dumping and leaking vinyl chloride into McCullom Lake in Illinois, causing 30 residents to develop brain cancer. A third client, the Drake Petroleum Company, had to pay $200,000 to a Hazardous Substance Superfund, according to a settlement it reached with the EPA.

Little said he did not personally represent Baltimore Gas & Electric Co. or Rohm & Haas Company—but his firm has. Little founded the firm in 1993 and is one of seven partners.

He said he did personally represent Drake Petroleum, but not on the Superfund issue. He also helped win a $2.35 million settlement for a specialty chemical company that sued a vendor who improperly disposed of waste it generated, according to his firm's current Web site.

'We Are Not Mother Teresa’

“We are not a law firm of legal services and we are not Mother Teresa,” Little told GoLocalProv. “We represent people legally in the private sector.”

He said his clients range from individuals to small businesses and larger corporations.

Little denied any perception that he might be less aggressive in protecting average consumers if elected Attorney General. “I don’t think there’s any way to conclude that,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any inconsistency.”

He noted that his many clients include the Groden Center, Inc., which operates a charter school and runs programs for developmentally disabled children and a small Massachusetts piping business which he said is “being squeezed out of business” by Dominion Energy. Also, Little said he spent 15 years representing on a pro-bono basis a death-row inmate in Alabama.

Little specializes in business law, business dispute resolution and construction law, according to the biography on his firm’s current Web site. One of his major clients has been Brown University. Little said he also does a lot of work in the construction industry.