ACC Ups Its Involvement in Outside Counsel Fee Fights
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Usually fights over attorney fees remain between the company and its outside counsel, or the in-house and outside bars. But some parties are increasingly moving the fight into the courtroom, and the Association of Corporate Counsel wants to fuel that trend.
“You’re starting to see more discussion of these issues in judicial space,” Amar Sarwal, ACC chief legal strategist, told CorpCounsel.com Wednesday. “It’s an interesting moment in terms of court involvement in the legal services industry.”
Sarwal said ACC “is strongly considering going to the Judicial Conference and talking about creating a more systemic rule. Rather than going case by case on overstaffing, churning, and markups, let’s create a rule that makes sense in the new normal world.” The Judicial Conference of the United States develops policy guidelines for the administration of courts.
Sarwal cited several examples of recent fee clashes, including the highly publicized fight between DLA Piper and one of its clients over alleged overbilling and churning of fees, the February filing of New York Attorney General A. G. Schneidermanopposing class counsels’ fees [PDF] related to the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme case, 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.
ACC has already spearheaded an initiative called Value Challenge, a program that seeks to relate the value to the cost of legal services.
Now the in-house group has also become actively involved in the court. It has filed its own “amicus letter” [PDF] in a securities litigation case against Citigroup Inc., objecting to fees for plaintiffs’ attorneys that include a large mark-up of costs for the use of contract lawyers.
Read original articleTags: Amar Sarwal, Association of Corporate Counsel, Judicial Conference, legal services
