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

The time involved in expert witness work on attorney fee awards.

Attorney fee opinions are tedious and time intensive to prepare. The most expensive work you can ask a lawyer expert to perform is the work of being an expert witness on the reasonableness of a disputed attorney fee amount.  The expense comes not from the hourly rate charged but rather it comes because of intensive time required to prepare a well-grounded opinion.  Because we are asked "how much does it cost?", we present the following regarding cost of such expert work and (near the bottom of this page) our usual estimate of fees you can expect.

The cost of true independent expert witnesses on legal fees is not economically justified in cases where the fee bills are under the $100,000 range. 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 the $100,000 range for a requested attorney fee award, the cost of expert testimony is usually 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, the time must be spent to look at the involved attorney's duplication / non-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.

Bucklin's expert witness service's  - estimates of cost.

Bucklin has the background, the research, and the ability to analyze an attorney's work and give an opinion on the reasonable value of attorney fees and costs. However, because of the time commitment Bucklin only wishes to do a limited number of attorney fee opinions. Bucklin limits his work on opinions regarding attorney's fees to cases where there is at least a quarter million dollars of attorney's fees involved. 

Fee billings of hundreds or thousands of individual items may require Bucklin to hire the support of additional contracted personnel to assist in mathematical calculations and tabulation pursuant to Bucklin's directions, which personnel cost must be included in the estimate of fees.  Our fee for conducting an attorney fee audit and the determination of a reasonable fee as described above is a fee based on an hourly fee basis of work actually done. 

From experience we have found that a rough estimate of fee for the examination can be based on the size of the legal bills asserted. In most cases, it takes about $10,000 of work to examine the necessary case or transaction documents and the first $100,000 of legal bills.  The examination of the fees billings above the initial first $100,000 of legal bills usually requires declining amounts of time.  In most cases, it will take about $22,000 to examine the necessary case or transaction documents and $300,000 of itemized legal work done, but only about $3,000 per $100,000 of additional fee billings above that first $300,000.

Before making an estimate of projected fees, and a requested deposit for work to be undertaken, we often need to know the nature of the project, and to see some representative examples of the billing detail.