Massachusetts’s highest court thought it a bit much that fees and costs would eat up $800,000 from an estate valued at $1.2 million, or two-thirds of the value at stake. [Robert Ambrogi, Legal Blog Watch; Above the Law]
Incidentally, Robert Ambrogi is hanging up his keyboard after an impressive four-year tenure at Law.com’s Legal Blog Watch, but he’ll continue to maintain his other sites. He has kind words for this site as one to “follow religiously”, too.
The trial will consider whether the law firm is entitled to a $42 million contingency fee under circumstances criticized by Ted in this space two years ago and David Giacalone more recently. [NYLJ]
Critics including the Securities and Exchange Commission dispute whether receivers really deserve $27 million for their work through May in cleaning up after the collapse of Texas businessman R. Allen Stanford’s empire. [AP/USA Today; earlier]
Fees for receivers, administrators and other professionals are eating up too much of the remaining assets of Madoff and other collapsed investment ventures, critics charge: “in one recent $6.6 million fraud, the receiver distributed 43 percent of the assets to the victim — the rest went to professionals.” [NY Post]
Must stores let in “social support” goats? Hot ADA issue we’ve often covered makes it into NYTimes mag [Rebecca Skloot] And Time mag tackles scandal of ADA-suit mass filing for $$, long familiar to our readers [Alison Stateman]
Can you guess mechanism by which snow globes turned out to cause fire hazard? (Then check link.) [K.C. Business Journal]
“Do Not Track” legislation could torpedo online-advertising models [ReadWriteWeb h/t @lilyhill]
What if plea-bargaining defendants could give D.A.s eBay-style feedback? [Greenfield]
UK cabinet minister wants govt to regulate Net with aim of child safety, Brit blogger says – hell, no! [Perry de Havilland, Samizdata]
As lawyer-driven mummeries go, which is worse, coffee machine overwarning or medical “informed consent”? [Happy Hospitalist]
Bogus memoirs nowadays spawn real lawsuits, as we remember from James Frey case [Elefant]
Is health care prohibition in our future? [KevinMD]
Massachusetts child support guidelines said to be highly onerous for dads already and getting worse [Bader, CEI]
Kid gloves from some local media for Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd & his magic mortgages [Christopher Fountain and again]
Had Robertson v. Princeton donor-intent suit gone to trial, lawyers might have billed $120 million hourly fees. How’d the number get that high? [Kennerly, Litigation & Trial and again]
A reminder: these microblog posts are based on a selection of my contributions to Twitter, which you can “follow” here.
Berman DeValerio Pease and other class action lawyers in the settlement of a case against Xerox want reimbursement of about $500 an hour for time spent by temporary attorneys who say they were getting $35/ and $40/hour. “Documents in the Xerox case also suggest the plaintiff lawyers spread the markup on temp attorneys among themselves, sometimes in puzzling ways. Partners at Bernstein Litowitz, a big New York class action firm, spent less than 20 hours on the case, according to court reports. Yet the firm wants $7.5 million for the 15,000 hours” its temps put in. (Daniel Fisher, Forbes, Dec. 8). Eight years ago we recounted how Maryland tort magnate Peter Angelos was expecting to reap between $15,000 and $30,000 an hour on legal work a large chunk of which had been carried out by $12/hour lawyer temps.