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Law firms’ excessive fees, Part II: “DLA Piper Is Not Alone: Why Law Firms Overbill”

March 28, 2013
/ Top Story

28 March 2013– Coming hot and heavy after the New York Times piece (click here) on the lawsuit involving DLA Piper and law firm over billing (“churn that bill, baby!”) comes — the comment and analysis! Of course DLA Piper’s immediate reaction was this is all just an “offensive attempt at humor”, issuing a memo to the entire firm and hastily arranging client conference calls (click here).

Our favorite is the piece by D. Casey Flaherty, corporate counsel, Kia Motors America, who has written numerous posts about the law firm over billing issue. In a piece today in Law Technology News … calling the DLA Piper story the “most delicious story” of his daily reading … he makes numerous points including:

1. Price is what you pay. Value is what you get (quoting Warren Buffet).

2. The billable hour model creates perverse incentives in aligning price and value.

3. The problem with incentives is that they work — even for lawyers.

4. This is a comedy of a major law firm being brought low by e-discovery.

5. Look at the debate over the enormous fees in the Bernie Madoff fraud case (the court wants to know how the law firms can possibly justify the fees charged).

6. He talks about the markup of contract attorney fees which we have written about before.

7. He notes the much maligned contract attorneys in the Quinn Emanuel law suit (for our previous post on this click here).

It is a good read and you can read his full analysis by clicking here.

And the Association of Corporate Counsel has upped its involvement in fights over attorney fees citing several examples: the fee clashes in the DLA Piper case, the February filing of New York Attorney General A. G. Schneiderman opposing class counsels’ fees related to the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme case (which we mentioned above), and a federal judge’s decision this week to slash a fee request in half in a suit against daily deal company LivingSocial, citing inefficient staffing and high hourly rates. For the full story click here.

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