Attorney Fee Award Disputes -- How Much Does It Cost
for the Expert Work Necessary?

It is tedious and time intensive for an expert to prepare an opinion on what is a reasonable attorney fee in the case.

In terms of hours of labor expended for the pages of report or testimony prepared, the most expensive work you can ask any lawyer to perform is the work of being an expert witness on the reasonableness of a disputed attorney fee amount.  The expense comes not from whatever is the attorney's usual hourly rate charge, but rather it comes from intensive time required to prepare a well-grounded opinion.

In cases where the fee bills are under the $80,000 range, the cost of the time of a true professional independent expert witnesses on legal fees often is not economically justified. For those smaller cases, the testimony of the billing attorney alone may be all that can be afforded. Or a few hours of "expert witness" time from the attorney in an office down the street from you may be all that you can afford.

But once you get to or past the $80,000 range for a requested attorney fee award, the cost of expert testimony is usually well justified on an economic balancing.  That is, the expert's fee usually is less than the amount the award may be adjusted upward or downward by evidentiary failures on your side. (Evidentiary failures" usually means the failure to have a good expert witness.) Hence, there is an economic benefit to obtaining true expert testimony on the reasonable value of attorney's fees in cases where fee awards are big considerations on the value of the case in settlement or trial.

Experts must take the time to determine not only the reasonableness of legal fee hourly charges, but also the reasonableness of the number of hours on a project, day by day, event by event.  In addition, time must be spent looking at the involved attorney's duplication/ on-duplication of effort or efficient/inefficient practices; standard of care and ethics in billing practices, and the reasonableness of law firm billing practices. The work done by an attorney and the work that reasonably should have been done are not always the same.

It cannot be emphasized too strongly that looking at work done by an attorney (sometimes over a period of years) and determining a reasonable fee is labor intensive, frequently requiring painstaking reading and reconstructing of the work done by the attorney in question.  A good expert fee opinion regarding the reasonableness of an attorney fee normally must be based on reading the necessary case or transaction documents and reconstructing the work done by the attorney in question. This usually takes a large amount of time.  After the actual work done (by the attorney in question) s reconstructed to a reasonable extent, then the fee billings must be examined --- item by item. As the fee billings are examined they frequently have to be categorized and a unique calculation matrix and unique tables of information established for the case.

Before making an estimate of projected fees, and a requested deposit for work to be undertaken, the expert needs to know the nature of the project, and to see some representative examples of the billings involved, as well as of pleadings, motions, and discovery.