eNonsense Discovered: Challenge the premise for “eDiscovery”
In the rarefied air of the multi-million dollar legal tab, the big line items are for document “discovery,” not research, motions, trial, actual legal advice, or whatever. Law firms blame others for...
View ArticleOver Estimation: Lawyers can budget fees, they just don’t want to
My firms and I have been living primarily off of “alternative” legal fees for decades — but we’ve also got lots of experience with hourly fees, too. For over 20 years now, we’ve also been showing...
View ArticlePick Your Forum: Arbitration can be a risky alternative to court
Here’s a little note for people thinking about putting a mandatory arbitration clause into a contract. We’ve had lots of posts already about arbitration, but here’s a different perspective. Mandatory...
View ArticleSemi-Lawyer Scam: Law firms pass cheap lawyers off as the real thing
A recent dispute over legal fees in a half-billion dollar Citigroup class action — fallout from the Wall Street crash — has shed light on how some law firms are using temporary or contract staff to...
View ArticlePrivateers: States pay absurdly disproportionate bounties for private lawyers
A side effect of limiting the direct protection of consumers by government agencies — remember the FTC? — is a cottage industry of plaintiff law firms raking in billions in legal fees for doing little...
View ArticleAbsence of Trust: ‘White shoe’ trust & estate lawyers dishonorably discharged...
The business model for many law firms depends on building an ever-growing base to an hourly billing pyramid. As noted many times before, this model has some built-in problems, including a tendency to...
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Paper Tigers: Real lawyers don’t expect everyone to agree with them
From a Prop 8 Post I suppose there must be people who call themselves baseball or football players, but who’ve never actually played in a game. Maybe they played flag football, intramurally, but never...
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Crumbling Legal Infrastructure: Patching the facade won’t fix billing pyramid
Bent Pyramid of Snefru(Copyrt by Allan J. Mathews) The flawed hourly billing revenue model causes all sorts of collateral damage to clients and even the lawyers who live by the model. You just can’t...
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Taurus, the Bull: Quality representation isn’t proportional to cost
As required by the 6th Amendment The Justice Department and at least one Supreme Court justice have noted the sorry state of public defender representation of indigent criminal defendants. Sometimes...
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Surf’s Up: Banks pulling legal work in-house as new litigation tsunami sighted
Most of the press about legal fees has been focusing on the rise in some law firm revenues, despite firm cutbacks and the recession, which has many clients looking for ways to cut back their outside...
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Inconvenient Truth: Firm’s internal e-mails expose excessive legal fees
There’s been quite a bit of negative publicity for DLA Piper thanks to internal emails among timekeepers gossiping about their work and the fees they were billing a client. The emails don’t really...
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Bragging Rights: Lawyers quoting uncollectable vanity rates
As we have noted many times before, those suggested retail hourly rates that some lawyers and firms publish aren’t real. The real, as collected, rates have been heavily discounted — often by half or...
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Suffer in Silence: Class counsel stifle class member objections
Fees for the Swiping It’s no secret that our system for using consumer class action litigation as a surrogate for actual government regulation and enforcement has created some bizarre unintended...
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Dead or Alive: Legal fee bounties distorting legal remedies
One technique governments — more specifically legislatures — use to regulate misconduct, without using tax money to pay for the cost of regulation, is to declare something illegal then create a system...
View ArticleFeudal State: Bankruptcy “king” challenges legal fees
To give you some idea why no progress is being made in controlling legal fees in bankruptcy, here’s an account from a recent conference of how the self-professed “King” of bankruptcy proposes to...
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Boutiquey Law: Hire the lawyer not the firm size
Here’s a press release from a boutique (small) law firm making their case why clients should send more business their way, rather than to “big-law” firms. The “boutique” label is mostly about...
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Mixed Message: Bar spanks lawyer for $6 million fee bump, side-stepping $14...
Legal Fee Ethics Enforcement Mechanism Although there is an ethics rule prohibiting unreasonable fees (or some variation on that term) in all US jurisdictions, this provision is rarely enforced by bar...
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MIA: Is your lawyer missing in action, with your money?
Here’s an example of the sort of basic mistakes lawyers make that can get them into ethics trouble. Note that the common thread is that client money was entrusted to the lawyer, either from a...
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Florida Gone Bananas: Yes, we have no lawyers, we have no lawyers today
Here’s an interesting discussion of how politics has changed the economics of practicing workers’ compensation law in Florida to deny workers justice by denying their lawyers the right to be paid a...
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Faking It: Firm inflates Seminole fees & expenses
Seminole Reservation 1830s Hourly billing creates an opportunity for lawyers to pad their bills with fictitious or inflated work, or to churn a matter by stirring up trouble, or simply reward...
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