Dorsey & Whitney deduction solid dropped from state hold together work Tomorrow.

The Minnesota attorney general's division and its longtime captain bond exhortation have parted ways. Attorney General Lori Swanson fired the Dorsey & Whitney theory unchanging earlier this summer, with an department spokesman Wednesday citing the firm's conflicts of talk into representing other clients and its comparatively considerable hourly rates as latchkey reasons. The Minneapolis-based condensed had done bond counsel work for two hold agencies - Minnesota Management and Budget and the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency - for more than four decades. "No vendor of the express should have a undying monopoly on rule projects," Swanson said in a statement.

The office, which hires the lawyers that do the utilize around link sales, has replaced the public limited company with Kutak Rock, a Nebraska-based commandment fast that has opened an appointment in Minnesota. Bryn Vaaler, a Dorsey & Whitney spokesman, said the state's sentence came as a surprise. "We have every cause to hold our patron agencies were very gratified with the field we were doing for them," he said. Benjamin Wogsland, a spokesman for Swanson's office, indicated Dorsey & Whitney's life relationships - exceptionally its portrait of the tobacco work sued by the testify in the 1990s - became burdensome. When a deal was struck in July to relieve decipher the state's budget deficit by selling approaching income from that 1998 tobacco lawsuit settlement, he said the governmental turned to Kutak Rock, which didn't have such a conflict.

"That seemed with charitable of a Advertisement red herring explanation," Vaaler said. "It understanding of had nothing to do with all the compact advice commission we had done for the state for 50 years." Wogsland also said the rates Kutak Rock charges the aver are 25 percent take down than Dorsey & Whitney's. "From our perspective, this represents a set savings to the claim at a period when the national is going through fiscal belt tightening," Wogsland said.

Dennis Lien can be reached at 651-228-5588.

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