12 Comments

I have seen many a shenanigan like what is outlined in that story—like an attorney billing 0.2 hour (twelve minutes) for leaving a voicemail or whatnot (and, many of those are insurance defense attorneys, who do not escape my criticism.) Highway robbery, I’d imagine. And that the attorney in this instance so casually passes off $575/hr as your average, garden-variety, reasonable fee borders on laughable. Are attorneys that valuable to society? At that price, it is nearly the equivalent to mining an ounce of pure gold every hour. That valuable? Hardly.

I work as a clerk for a judge. One time plaintiffs brought a lawsuit trying to collect money owed on a contract. The contract said that the losing party had to pay “reasonable” attorney fees.

The plaintiffs won and then their attorneys demanded as attorney fees a third of the contract costs recovered pursuant to their contingency fee agreement, to be paid on top of the contract costs. The problem is that that third was worth about $60,000 for a case that was uncontested and that lasted only 6 months.

The court denied the request because it determined that the attorney would had to have worked 6 weeks straight working solely on this case charging $250 an hour. A very doubtful proposition.

During the legendary 7 year IBM antitrust trial, associates at the defense firm had a contest to see who could bill the most hours in one day.

Several tied at 24 hours.

One enterpresing associate booked a flight to California, worked in the office, the cab, in the airport and on the flight, and due to the time change billed 27 hours in one day.

I think billing fraud is probably rampant at the big name firms, and corporate America goes along to get the brains and names.

Well, technically, you can bill 24.5 hours in a day if you spend part of the day working during a flight from east to west. The time change adds additional hours to the day, right?

Jason, the vast majority of insurance defense attorneys DO NOT charge $575 an hour. Try $100-$200. There are probably places where the insurance defense guys are charging LESS than $100/hour – what my plumber charges. And billing 12 minutes for a leaving a voicemail is entirely appropriate where it takes 12 minutes to review the file, formulate your thoughts, leave the message, and memo the same.

So while I understand that defense attorneys don’t escape your criticism (and the criticism that tort reform, if strong, would cut into their business, too), AND conceding that the billable hours system has its problems, calling insurance defenders “highway robbers” is way off. Even a white-shoe firm charging in the $400s for a direct-representation products liability case, it should be noted, didn’t START the lawsuit.

Any actual lawyers commenting here? I’ve worked as many as 60 hours non-stop. 24-36 hour non-stop stretches, while not exactly routine, are hardly shocking. Thats not to say billing fraud isn’t rampant, however….

Anonymous, thanks for the feedback. I agree insurance defense work in many venues is in the range you suggest. I didn’t mean to suggest they made $500+/hr but was referring to the fee request in the linked story. And my “highway robbery” comment was more directed at the $575/hr attorney, not something under $200.

I can’t entirely agree with your billing analysis, though, “12 minutes to review the file, formulate your thoughts, leave the message, and memo the same.”

What? 12 minutes to review a file that I already paid the attorney to know in the first place? Formulate your thoughts? Come on, now.

Now, maybe in some instances this may be reasonable if the litigation is sufficiently complex, but having been on the receiving end of such voicemails and later bills I know darn well what was and was not involved in leaving a message and it does not take 12 minutes.

actually, .2 hours can represent anywhere between 7 and 12 minutes.

Jasen, some attorneys… just… think… more… slooowly.

Well, Jay, there may just be a case for a massive class-action overbilling suit (if any attorney dare bring it, against fellow attorneys.) So, “.2 hours can represent anywhere between 7 and 12 minutes.” It can? I have heard this rationale—that any minute “or fraction thereof” will count for the next billable fraction. Let’s see how that works.

0.1 of billable time represents one-tenth of an hour, or six minutes. So, what you say is that if an attorney works 0.1 plus a second (six minutes and a fraction) he/she bills for 0.2 hours or twelve minutes? It’s fairer this way: if an attorney works less than three minutes on a task he/she bills 0.0 and notes the time accordingly; if he works from three to just under six minutes the time is legitimately 0.1; six to eight and a fraction (round down) is also 0.1 but nine to twelve is 0.2—so on average every minute is billed fairly to the client. So on and so forth.

What you propose is that for every six minutes plus one second the attorney bills 0.2 (twelve minutes.) Not fair. That means, on average for every nine minutes (half point between six and twelve minutes) of work the attorney bills twelve minutes (0.2) of time. At $200/hr that’s averaging $10 overbilling for each hour. Hey kids, can you say “class action?” I knew you could!

These shenanigans lead to billing 0.1 or 0.2 ($20 or $40, thank you insurance defense attorneys, and others) for leaving a voice message or whatnot. That’s B.S.

Does the American Bar Association have an ethics opinion on this? I’d like to know. But, I reason that if any other profession would on average bill twelve minutes for nine minutes of work would get sued at the drop of a hat.

At the risk of overprolonging the comments here, it might be pointed out that for attorneys to keep track of their time to the SECOND is both impractical and doesn’t serve anyone’s interests: the attorney’s or the client’s (attorney would spend more time on this than work!). And some rounding up, as noted, is built in: a phone call not quite six minutes still gets billed that way. The insurance company devising that system knows full well that they aren’t going to get free service because a phone call lasted five minutes and 59 seconds.

Compounding all this is the slight absurdity of assuming that you can capture attorney work in such exacting time increments. If you wake up in the middle of the night and think for a few minutes about what to do on a case, that’s legitimate work, but no attorney ever bills for “woke up in middle of night and decided to make a motion for X.” Nor do I know of any attorneys who make sure to subract the three seconds they had a fleeting thought about where to eat lunch while working on a motion that’s taking them all day.

Lots of lawyer and billing abuses out there, sure, but I don’t see the nickel-and-dime splicing here as among the worst.

[…] among the most egregious that this court has seen in almost 14 years on the bench.” Earlier: Nov. 14, 2007 (McCoy’s firm “billed [opponent] Federal Express for 23.5 hours of one of its […]