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

When attorney fee awards are big considerations on the value of the case in settlement or trial -- there is an economic benefit to your client if you obtain  solid expert testimony on the reasonable value of the attorneys fees.

Specifically, the amount you pay to obtain the time of a true expert on attorney fees is often 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.

It's a cost to benefit consideration which too many attorneys fail to make.

Before making an estimate of projected fees, and a requested deposit for work to be undertaken, the expert needs to know something about the nature and extent of the litigation and fee billings.  Only then can the amount of time the expert must spend be estimated and only then can there be an estimate of projected fees.  Here's why:

1. A true expert on attorney fees must look at each and every time entry by the attorneys who did the work, and the expert must look at an appropriate number of the case documents to analyze what was done, day by day, by the attorneys.
    
2. As the expert examines the fee billings and the case documents, he/she frequently has to categorize the information, building unique tables of information established for the case.
    
3. The expert must do an independent investigation, and cannot rely solely on what the retaining attorney tells the expert.
    
4. Unless the proper analysis and investigation is made, the expert has no reliable base upon which to give an opinion  on "the reasonable fee for the work done."

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/ non-duplication of effort or efficient/ inefficient practices; the lawyer's adherence/ non -adherence both to ethics standards in billing and also to a reasonable standard of care in billing practices; plus the reasonableness of the law firm billing practices.

The work done by an attorney and the work that reasonably should have been done are not always the same.  The fee expert testifies to the latter by examining the former of those two.

In cases where the fee bills are under the $100,000 range, the cost of the time of a true professional independent expert witnesses on legal fees often is not economically justified. But once you get to the $100,000 range for a requested attorney fee award, the cost of expert testimony is often justified on an economic balancing basis.

It's a cost-benefit consideration --- the amount you pay to obtain the time of a true expert on attorney fees versus the amount the award may be adjusted upward or downward if you do not have solid expert testimony.