When the Georgia Supreme Court sits down for a special session at the University of Georgia law school in Athens Tuesday, the justices will have already heard from a chorus of lawyers hired by business groups to try and persuade them to toss a big verdict against Chrysler.

The verdict was $150 million in a spring 2015 trial in Bainbridge for the family of a 4-year-old Remi Walden, killed when a Jeep gas tank exploded. By summer that year, Judge J. Kevin Chason of South Georgia Circuit Superior Court has slashed the award to $40 million.

Still too much, according to five amicus briefs filed by business groups supporting Chrysler's position in the case.

So many lawyers are involved that the court has become concerned about its own conflicts. The high court's clerk, Therese Barnes, sent a letter to counsel on Oct. 16 saying she had been instructed to give notice that William Jordan of Alston & Bird, who filed an amicus brief on behalf of the U.S. and the Georgia Chamber of Commerce, also happens to be the chair of Justice Keith Blackwell's campaign committee.

“In accordance with the Code of Judicial Conduct, this information is being disclosed to you on the record so that you will have the opportunity to consider whether you have any reservation or objection to Justice Blackwell continuing to participate in the resolution of this matter,” Barnes wrote. She asked for a response by 5 p.m. Oct. 18.

Lead plaintiffs' counsel Jim Butler of Butler Wooten & Peak wrote back the next day to say he and his team “have no objection to Justice Blackwell continuing to participate.”

Jordan is not the only well-connected lawyer seeking to influence the decision in this case.

Randy Evans of Dentons, President Donald Trump's pick to be an ambassador, is the only signer of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers' brief in Chrysler's support. The justices will recall that Evans chaired Gov. Nathan Deal's Judicial Nominating Commission and in the process helped put the three new ones added this year into their seats they now hold.

Evans told the court that this judgment against Chrysler threatens to knock Georgia out of its national number one ranking as a place to do business and threatens to make it more of a “Judicial Hellhole.”

Along with citations of the publications that gave the state those seemingly conflicting distinctions, Evans offered the conclusion that the remaining award is “far above anything the appellate courts in Georgia have ever upheld.”

Chrysler's lead appellate counsel, Washington, D.C.-based Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher partner Thomas Dupree Jr., made the same point at oral arguments before the Georgia Court of Appeals last year. Butler countered that looking at verdicts upheld on appeal skews the view by omitting those that were paid.

The Court of Appeals upheld the $40 million judgment. Evans alleged that decision “turned Georgia law on its head” in ruling that wealth evidence is “always admissible.”

The wealth evidence plays a prominent role in the amicus briefs. The lawyers are referring to Butler calling attention to Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne's paycheck.

Writing for the Product Liability Advisory Council Inc., Louis Fiorilla and Forrest Latta of Burr & Forman noted that Butler “asked a Chrysler witness to confirm and read into the record information about Chrysler's CEO's annual pay, incentives, and fringe benefits. Chrysler's objections to these compensation questions were overruled.”

The business groups took issue in their amicus filings with Butler's closing argument, in which they said he urged the jury to use the CEO's compensation “as a basis for calculating a wrongful death award.” They quoted Butler asking the jury to “return a verdict for the full value of Remington's life of at least $120 million.” They said he added that amount would be “less than two years of what Mr. Marchionne made just last year.” Butler added, “He made $68 million last year.”

The case is Chrysler v. Walden, No. S17G0832.