Here is why attorney fee opinions are tedious and most attorney experts do not want to devote the necessary time to preparing a true foundation for an expert opinion of the reasonableness of an attorney fee.   In many cases we must take all of the following first steps.

1)  Gather and copy time records: all the attorney invoices or other available data showing the time spend by the attorney whose work is being reviewed.

2) Code all  time entries so that various categories of work or separate tasks can be separately analyzed, even though a particular task's time was sprinkled though months or years, or involving multiple attorneys.   Just think of the effort and time that is devoted to looking at an item on an attorney bill, deciding exactly what is meant (for example, it the item says "legal research on attorney privilege claim" looking at the motions in the case and seeing which motion the legal research applies to), and then coding it, by hand, item by item.

3) Compile tables of information regarding the attorney's time records (or lack thereof);

4) Review of a necessary amount of the work product not only of the attorneys whose fees are involved in the matter, but also the work of the attorneys for other parties whose work the reviewed attorney had to respond to.  This work product review will usually include, but not limited to all pleadings, motions, deposition transcripts, trial transcripts, et cetera.   This is necessary, for example, to know whether 10 or 100 hours of time is reasonable for a motion. The reviewer must know what the motion was about, what was its importance in the case, and what other parties' attorneys were doing in the case on the motion.

While it takes less time to read a pleading, or a deposition, or a motion with all its supporting documents, than it did to originally prepare the legal item, the time involved in such reading takes days and days of time for the legal audit reviewer.  In fact, the amount of work spend in such review has to be pointed out to the trier of fact, who otherwise may not understand why a true expert opinion on the reasonableness of attorney fees may sometimes exceed 10% or more of the fee of the attorney whose work is being reviewed.

5) Direct and supervise staff.  The cases on which we work are so large that often a person giving the opinion cannot personaly do all the necessary coding and calculations.  Necessarily, for an appropriate foundation for the opinion, we must spend adequate time securing and directing support personnel to providing computer coding and entry and mathematical calculation. (Normally, was use the services of the personnel at Accountability Services, Inc, to give us the additional clerical and mathematical support these special projects take.)

The above is a first phase of the task.  Now another phase must be investigated: a market value, reasonable hourly fee value, of the attorney's services in the area involved.   It is not enough to simply say: I think X dollars is a reasonable hourly fee.  The opinion of a true expert is grounded on adequate investigatory time on the market value of fees in the area involved.

All the above does is lead to a lodestar calculation of time multiplied by a reasonable hourly rate.

There are more items of work that go into determining and evaluating a reasonable fee.   But you get the idea.  There simply is a lot of time spent.