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In late February, the law firm Keller Postman made a $50,000 donation to a fundraising committee for James Uthmeier, the Ron DeSantis-appointed attorney general of Florida who is now running for election to a full term. The five-figure gift was, records show, the first campaign contribution the Chicago-based law firm has ever made in Florida.
Two months later, Uthmeier hired Keller Postman to represent the state in a lawsuit against artificial intelligence developer OpenAI — on a contingency fee contract that could net the firm as much as $50 million in fees, if the litigation is successful.
Ashley Keller, a founding partner of the firm, said the contribution and the contract are unrelated to each other. Keller — who also personally donated $3,000 to Uthmeier — said Keller Postman is expanding in Florida. And he said his firm has a long history of giving money to politicians in other states, from a mayoral candidate in Chicago to a state Supreme Court justice in Alabama.
“We gave money to General Uthmeier’s campaign for the same reasons we give to other campaigns: We want the candidate to win because we support his policy priorities,” Keller said. “Though cynical people may find this hard to believe, we actually support politicians who we think will serve the public welfare.”
Keller Postman is part of a lucrative vein Uthmeier is mining as he seeks a full four-year term as the top law enforcement officer in Florida. Records show the former DeSantis chief of staff has raised more than $300,000 from law firms and other vendors who have been awarded contracts by the Attorney General’s Office since he took over in February 2025.
Among the examples of donors doing business with Uthmeier’s office while simultaneously financing his re-election campaign:
A partner at the Colorado firm First & Fourteenth put $2,500 into Uthmeier’s political committee, Friends of James Uthmeier, on Nov. 6 of last year. That was three days after Uthmeier’s office hired the firm to sue Planned Parenthood on a contract paying up to $750 an hour.
Attorneys at Boies Schiller Flexner have together donated at least $11,000 to Uthmeier between his regular campaign account and his fundraising committee. The New York firm with offices in Miami and Fort Lauderdale has inked at least three contracts with the Attorney General’s Office during Uthmeier’s tenure — including one that pays the firm as much as $895 an hour.
The two senior partners at Washington, D.C.-based Cooper & Kirk have delivered a combined $16,000 to Uthmeier. The firm currently holds at least five engagements with the Attorney General’s Office, according to the agency’s contract database — including a contingency fee contract in a lawsuit against the parent company of social media platform Snapchat and two hourly fee deals each paying up to $795 an hour.
But by far the biggest donor among law firms landing work from the Attorney General’s Office is Lawson Huck Gonzalez, a Tallahassee firm that Uthmeier has hired on a pair of contracts for litigation related to insulin pricing and contamination from per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, which are also known as “PFAS” or “forever chemicals.” Shareholders and associates at Lawson Huck Gonzalez have bundled at least $129,000 to Uthmeier between his campaign account and fundraising committee, records show.
The vast majority of those donations — $103,000 — came from one of the firm’s co-founders: Jason Gonzalez, a longtime Republican lawyer who has worked closely with Uthmeier in the past on issues such as Ron DeSantis’ state Supreme Court picks.
“I think Attorney General James Uthmeier and his wife Jean are two of the most honorable and self-sacrificial people to serve our state. It’s a privilege to get to support the campaign,” Gonzalez said.
“I haven’t been paid anything by the Office of Attorney General since Uthmeier started,” he added. “The only two contracts I’ve entered with that office are contingency fee contracts on relatively new engagements. We’re working those cases at no charge unless we’re able recover something later.”
Lawson Huck Gonzalez is not the only firm that Uthmeier has brought in on the insulin and PFAS litigation. A co-counsel in both cases is the Miami-based Ferraro Law Firm — which has donated at least $28,000 to Uthmeier.
Then there’s GradyLaw, a Naples-based firm run by Tom Grady, a former Republican state representative and a substantial GOP donor.
The Miami Herald recently revealed that Uthmeier hired Grady to represent the state in litigation against the streaming platform Roku — and picked Grady’s firm over a competing proposal that, the Herald reported, would likely have saved the state hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees should the state eventually prevail or negotiate a settlement.
About six months after he hired Grady’s firm, records show that Uthmeier received a combined $33,000 from 11 different corporate entities connected to Grady.
“After studying his [Uthmeier’s] performance in office for over a year, it was clear that he deserved our support,” Grady told the Herald in June.
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Law firms aren’t the only Attorney General’s Office vendors who have become James Uthmeier donors.
Last fall, for instance, Uthmeier’s office signed a three-year contract for process servicing with TSI Management, a Pinellas Park-based company that does business as TRGT Legal.
This spring, Uthmeier took $20,000 from TSI and a trio of related companies.
Florida please do not elect this dude to be our AG. He helped steal $10,000,000.00 in Medicaid money. He doesn't care about democracy, he cares about power.
I am tempted to refer to this odious pol as a weasel, but that would bring discredit to all Mustelidae. The level of corruption in FL is second only to that in DC. What a state...