December 5, 2006--56 Lawyers??
My remarkable cousin Chuck died suddenly two years ago, and since that time I have served as his executor.
In that role, I needed to engage an estate attorney and an accountant to help with all the legal paperwork and fillings involved in settling an estate. Thankfully, my cousin did a good job of allocating assets before he departed so that his estate, from a legal perspective, was not all that complicated.
But I found, to my dismay but not surprise, that uncomplicated does not mean modest when it comes to costs. I will not go into the gory details, but suffice it to say that if I didn’t push back and threaten that I would report to the lawyer to the Florida state attorney general and bar association, he would have taken Chuck’s heirs to the proverbial cleaners.
What tipped me off, what set me off was a bill I received for his secretary’s twenty-two word email to me in which she responded to a one sentence question—“Have you as yet filed the X,Y,Z form with the court?” Her response, in effect, said that it would be done the following week.
The estate was billed for one-third of an hour for this email exchange. When I called the attorney to raise questions about a simple question that seemed to me to require much less than 20 minutes to answer—I suggested about five minutes seemed about right—he shot back to me, with indignation, that she had to walk from her desk to pull the file and that also took time!
This then led me to review all previous bills and I found many similar examples of, to put it gently, inflated billing. He and I fought about that too and, again under threat, I was able to get him to reduce his overcharges.
So when in today’s NY Times I saw a report about how much the lawyers billed Brooke Astor’s guardians for work they allegedly did in their tortured, Oedipal struggle with her 82 year-old son (he was caught ripping off many of her assets as she found herself, at 104, with diminished capacities—he and his young wife had run out of patience waiting for his mom to move on), I was again dismayed but not surprised. (Article linked below.)
Admittedly this is a much more complicated case than Chuck’s estate, but when you look at the details in the lawyers’ bill, you discover that they charged for the work of 56 attorneys, 65 legal assistants, 6 accountants, 5 bankers, 2 public relations firms, a law school professor (of course!), and, considering the season, a partridge in a pear tree.
The bill? A mere $3.0 million. The judge to whom the bill was sent was clearly also dismayed. So he cut it back to “just” $2.2 million, calling the original figure “staggering.”
Since when is $2.2 mil not staggering? Was he suggesting that this case required only 52 lawyers?
If I were one of Mrs. Astor’s guardians I would have asked the attorneys how much they were charging for staff to walk back and forth to retrieve files. I’ll bet it would have knocked the bill down further—to maybe even $2.1 million. Who knows? Every hundred thou counts.
In that role, I needed to engage an estate attorney and an accountant to help with all the legal paperwork and fillings involved in settling an estate. Thankfully, my cousin did a good job of allocating assets before he departed so that his estate, from a legal perspective, was not all that complicated.
But I found, to my dismay but not surprise, that uncomplicated does not mean modest when it comes to costs. I will not go into the gory details, but suffice it to say that if I didn’t push back and threaten that I would report to the lawyer to the Florida state attorney general and bar association, he would have taken Chuck’s heirs to the proverbial cleaners.
What tipped me off, what set me off was a bill I received for his secretary’s twenty-two word email to me in which she responded to a one sentence question—“Have you as yet filed the X,Y,Z form with the court?” Her response, in effect, said that it would be done the following week.
The estate was billed for one-third of an hour for this email exchange. When I called the attorney to raise questions about a simple question that seemed to me to require much less than 20 minutes to answer—I suggested about five minutes seemed about right—he shot back to me, with indignation, that she had to walk from her desk to pull the file and that also took time!
This then led me to review all previous bills and I found many similar examples of, to put it gently, inflated billing. He and I fought about that too and, again under threat, I was able to get him to reduce his overcharges.
So when in today’s NY Times I saw a report about how much the lawyers billed Brooke Astor’s guardians for work they allegedly did in their tortured, Oedipal struggle with her 82 year-old son (he was caught ripping off many of her assets as she found herself, at 104, with diminished capacities—he and his young wife had run out of patience waiting for his mom to move on), I was again dismayed but not surprised. (Article linked below.)
Admittedly this is a much more complicated case than Chuck’s estate, but when you look at the details in the lawyers’ bill, you discover that they charged for the work of 56 attorneys, 65 legal assistants, 6 accountants, 5 bankers, 2 public relations firms, a law school professor (of course!), and, considering the season, a partridge in a pear tree.
The bill? A mere $3.0 million. The judge to whom the bill was sent was clearly also dismayed. So he cut it back to “just” $2.2 million, calling the original figure “staggering.”
Since when is $2.2 mil not staggering? Was he suggesting that this case required only 52 lawyers?
If I were one of Mrs. Astor’s guardians I would have asked the attorneys how much they were charging for staff to walk back and forth to retrieve files. I’ll bet it would have knocked the bill down further—to maybe even $2.1 million. Who knows? Every hundred thou counts.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
10:12 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home