The billable hour is the monster inside the law business. Thanks to dogged discovery efforts by a former  DLA Piper client, the monster has broken out of its lair and is standing, somewhat mortified but proud and unbowed, in the media’s cross-hairs.

If you’ve been on vacation, here are billing emails discovered in a lawsuit between (depending on your side of the case) a deadbeat client and an upstanding law firm or a virtuous businessman and his rapacious lawyers.

“I hear we are already 200k over our estimate — that’s Team DLA Piper!” wrote Erich P. Eisenegger, a lawyer at the firm. Another DLA Piper lawyer, Christopher Thomson, replied, noting that a third colleague, Vincent J. Roldan, had been enlisted to work on the matter. “Now Vince has random people working full time on random research projects in standard ‘churn that bill, baby!’ mode,” Mr. Thomson wrote. “That bill shall know no limits.”

I don’t know who Piper’s crisis PR team is but I’d hire a new advisor. When you’ve been caught with your pants down in a public space, you do not rush to blame the alleged victim, you do not say the written evidence doesn’t reflect the facts on the ground, you do not demonize the “former attorneys” who created the evidence, and, you do not assert your firm’s integrity (having recently housed the miscreants whose behavior belies that claim).

Nor do you protest that other people charged with reviewing your invoices are the appropriate control for your internal billing practices, accuse your own former attorneys of lying about their own behavior, nor assert your innocence before you have had the time to investigate the matter yourself (which investigation cannot possibly have taken place between the time in which these two New York Times articles appeared: March 25, 3:36 p.m. Suit Offers a Peek at the Practice of Inflating a Legal Bill and  March 26, 5:19 p.m., DLA Piper Calls Emails Cited in Lawsuit an Offensive Attempt at Humor.

In the latter article, DLA Piper contends the evidence of wrongdoing doesn’t evidence wrongdoing.

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Tags: Christopher Thomson, DLA Piper, Erich P. Eisenegger