There is a concept so basic to the practice of law that it appears in the first year of every law school curriculum in the country, that every bar examination tests, and that every licensed attorney in Arkansas swore, upon admission, to honor: you do not sue your own client. You do not stand on opposite sides of the courtroom from the person who is paying your bills—or, in this case, the constitutional board that the legislature assigned you to represent. You do not, while defending that client in one court, attack them in another. You do not, while claiming to be their lawyer, attempt to strip them of their right to hire a different one.
Tim Griffin has done all of these things. He has done them as Attorney General of the State of Arkansas—an office that, by statute, exists to represent the people of Arkansas and the institutions through which they govern themselves.
A sitting judge noticed. The organized bar of Arkansas has not.
The Job Description
Arkansas Code Annotated section 25-16-702 assigns the Attorney General as the legal representative of the state’s agencies, departments, boards, and commissions. The Arkansas Board of Corrections is one of them. This is not a discretionary arrangement. It is the statutory architecture of state legal representation: one lawyer for the state, accountable to the public, with a client base that includes every arm of Arkansas government.
That arrangement carries obligations. The most fundamental is the one that predates the statutes, the rules of professional conduct, and the bar examination itself: the obligation of loyalty. A lawyer who represents a client may not take positions adverse to that client’s legal interests. A lawyer who disagrees with a client’s decisions has options—counsel, persuade, withdraw. The one option that is not on the table is to walk into a courthouse and sue them.
Tim Griffin chose that option.
Three Clients, One Lawyer, Zero Loyalty
To understand the magnitude of what Griffin did, it is necessary to hold three facts in your mind simultaneously.
Fact one: When the Arkansas Board of Corrections filed its constitutional lawsuit challenging Acts 185 and 659 of 2023, the Attorney General’s office was actively representing the Board in multiple federal civil-rights cases—lawsuits brought by prisoners against the Department of Corrections, cases in which the Board’s institutional interests were directly at stake and in which the AG’s office was appearing as counsel of record.
Fact two: In December 2023, Attorney General Griffin filed a lawsuit against the Arkansas Board of Corrections in Pulaski County Circuit Court, alleging violations of the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act. He sued the Board. His own client. The client his office was simultaneously defending in federal court.
Fact three: In the constitutional case—the lawsuit the Board filed to vindicate its Amendment 33 authority—the Attorney General’s office entered an appearance on behalf of Governor Sanders and Secretary of Corrections Profiri. The defendants. The people the Board was suing. Griffin’s office was defending the Governor against the Board while simultaneously claiming to represent the Board in federal litigation.
Client. Plaintiff. Defense counsel for the adverse party.
This is not a close ethical question. It is not a gray area. It is not a matter of competing institutional loyalties or the complex realities of government lawyering. It is a conflict of interest so obvious and so severe that any first-year law student—fresh from their Professional Responsibility course—would identify it on sight.
The Arkansas Rules of Professional Conduct prohibit a lawyer from representing a client when that representation is “directly adverse to another client.” Rule 1.7(a)(1). Griffin’s office was not merely adverse to the Board. It had sued the Board, was simultaneously defending the Board’s adversaries, and was doing so while maintaining the formal pretense of also being the Board’s lawyer.
The Judges Who Noticed
Both circuit judges in Pulaski County who were presented with these facts noticed the conflict right away. Judge James ordered that the specific lawyers employed by the Attorney General’s office, who represented the Board actively, could not be adverse to the Board in the Amendment 33 litigation. She ordered them to withdraw from the case.
Pulaski County Circuit Judge Timothy Fox, presiding over Griffin’s FOIA lawsuit against the Board, went a step further.
In an order that deserves to be read by every member of the Arkansas bar and reprinted in full, Judge Fox found that “the Attorney General has sued his own clients, in violation of his duties and responsibilities legislatively mandated to him by the Arkansas General Assembly,” that the AG had “acted in contravention of his statutory duties to represent the state defendants,” and was “apparently attempting to deliberately deprive his state clients of any legal representation of any nature or kind.”
Read the operative word: deliberately. Not negligently. Not inadvertently. Not as the byproduct of a complex institutional arrangement that no one had anticipated. A sitting judge of the State of Arkansas found that the Attorney General deliberately attempted to strip his own clients of the right to legal counsel.
He dismissed the lawsuit as a consequence, and Griffin appealed.
The Illegal Exaction Threat on Remand
When the Board exercised its statutory right under Arkansas Code Annotated section 25-16-711 to retain special counsel—a right that exists precisely because the legislature anticipated scenarios in which the Attorney General cannot represent a constitutional board without conflict—Griffin did not simply oppose the decision. He weaponized it.
On remand of the FOIA case, Griffin’s office amended its complaint to include the Board’s outside counsel personally. The theory: that the payment of attorney’s fees to a law firm retained under a statute that expressly authorizes such retention constituted an illegal exaction of taxpayer funds—a claim that, if accepted, would expose the attorneys personally to liability for doing the work they were hired, authorized, and legally entitled to do.
Think about what this means in practice. A lawyer is retained by a constitutional board under a statute that expressly permits the arrangement. The lawyer does the work. The lawyer wins. And the state’s chief law enforcement officer then threatens to sue that lawyer personally for the crime of having been paid for winning.
This is not zealous advocacy. It is a message. The message is: if you represent clients we don’t approve of, we will come for you personally.
The Settlement That Finished the Job
Griffin lost the constitutional case. Circuit Judge Patricia James held, on November 3, 2025, that Acts 185 and 659 of 2023 violate Amendment 33 of the Arkansas Constitution and are “ultra vires, unconstitutional, and void.” She enjoined the state from interfering with the Board’s right to pay its counsel.
Griffin appealed. He did not win the appeal. Instead, after the Governor filled three Board seats with political allies, the newly constituted Board majority agreed to a settlement in which it declared, in writing, that its own retention of outside counsel had been “unlawful”—validating, retroactively, every argument Griffin had made and lost in the proceedings below.
The outside counsel—whose retention had been upheld by Judge James, who had survived multiple disqualification attempts, who had won the constitutional case—was not told the settlement was being negotiated. He was not a party to it. He did not sign it. He received no consideration for the extinguishment of his fee claims, which the settlement purports to release on behalf of parties who had no legal authority to release them.
Griffin got, through a reconstituted board and a settlement agreement, what he could not get through two years of litigation: a declaration that the lawyers who beat him were wrong, that their services were illegal, and that they will not be paid.
It is, as a matter of legal process, extraordinary. A litigant loses. He appeals. While the appeal is pending, his political patron fills the opposing party’s seats with allies. The allies settle. The settlement incorporates the losing party’s legal positions as agreed facts. The losing party then asks the Supreme Court to vacate the ruling against him on the basis of that settlement.
The legal term for manufacturing a favorable outcome through means that bypass the merits is collusion. The political term is rigging the game. Neither is a permissible basis for vacatur by a court committed to the integrity of its own process.
Thankfully for all Arkansans, the rule of law still means something in the Pulaski County Circuit Court. Judge Fox ultimately dismissed the illegal exaction claims against Abtin Mehdizadegan and his law firm, Hall Booth Smith, P.C.; and he further set a hearing for May 4, 2026, to determine how best to resolve the collusive settlement matter that the Attorney General brought into his Court.
What the Law School Taught and What Griffin Did
The Rules of Professional Conduct that Griffin swore to uphold when he was admitted to the Arkansas bar—the same rules he enforces, as Attorney General, against every other lawyer in the state—are not suggestions. They are not aspirational guidelines that apply to ordinary lawyers but yield to the political priorities of constitutional officers. They apply to Tim Griffin and every lawyer in the Attorney General’s office. And they apply with special force because public lawyers have a higher duty to serve the interests of justice.
Rule 1.7 prohibits concurrent conflicts of interest. Rule 1.9 governs duties to former clients. Rule 8.4 prohibits conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation, and conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice. These rules exist because the legal system depends on lawyers who honor them—not only when it is convenient, but especially when it is not
The Arkansas Supreme Court Committee on Professional Conduct is the body charged with investigating and disciplining attorneys who violate these rules. It has, to public knowledge, taken no action regarding Griffin’s conduct in this matter and initiated no inquiry.
The Arkansas Bar Association, which represents the lawyers of this state and which exists in part to uphold the standards of the profession, has made no public statement regarding a sitting attorney general who was found by a circuit court judge to have deliberately attempted to deprive his own clients of legal representation.
The silence is loud. It is also a choice.
Why It Matters
The Attorney General of Arkansas is not merely a political officer. He is a licensed attorney, bound by the same rules as every other member of the bar. He is also the lawyer that the law assigns to the state’s most vulnerable institutional clients—the boards and agencies that lack the political power and the independent resources to retain their own counsel except in the narrowest of circumstances. When that lawyer turns on those clients, not because the law requires it, but because the politics demand it, the institutional clients have nowhere to turn.
That is what happened to the Arkansas Board of Corrections. A constitutional board, exercising constitutionally protected authority, was sued by its own lawyer, threatened with illegal-exaction liability, stripped of the counsel it had legally retained, and finally subjected to a settlement agreement—negotiated without its original members, without its lawyers, and without its knowledge—that declared everything it had done unlawful.
The lawyers who represented the Board during this ordeal have not been paid. One of them was threatened with personal liability for doing his job. Both of them watched a settlement they never signed declare their services illegal.
The Attorney General of Arkansas accomplished this. He did it in the name of the people of Arkansas. He did it as a licensed member of the bar.
The people of Arkansas—and the bar that is supposed to speak for the integrity of the legal profession—are owed an accounting.
ICYMI:
Intro: Is Separation of Powers ‘Fake News’ in Arkansas?
Part 1: The Governor Lost in Court. So, She Changed the Court, the Board, and the Rules.
