FAMILY LAW IN THE FAST LANE
October 29, 2010 § Leave a comment
This article is copied from the Washington Post online edition. After you read it, you may have an unsettling sense of unreality. Lawyers charging $850 an hour for a divorce? Billing for more than 7 hours a day, 365 days a year? Billing for as many as 71 hours in a day? $624,000 in fees for a divorce trial? I am not making this up.
High-priced lawyer sues former client, then agrees to pay him $102,000
By Tom Jackman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 25, 2010; 6:29 PM
Glenn C. Lewis is an acknowledged titan of the D.C. area divorce bar, a former president of the Virginia Bar Association who boasts that he is the most expensive lawyer in the region: $850 an hour. He has an impressive office in the District and an array of high-profile clients.
So it fascinated the Fairfax County courthouse when Lewis sued one of his former clients for an additional $500,000 in fees and interest, although he’d already been paid $378,000.
The fascinating part was that the client, a lawyer himself, fired back. He hired another former state bar president, Bernard J. DiMuro, who dug through Lewis’s billing records and hired two more divorce bar giants – including another former state bar president – as his experts. The experts said Lewis had done a poor job and didn’t deserve nearly $900,000 for his work.
In Fairfax Circuit Court on Friday, Lewis capitulated. He agreed to pay his former client more than $102,000, including $25,000 in sanctions imposed on Lewis’s lawyers for defying pretrial orders. Lewis even failed to show up for his own deposition.
Lewis, who for years hosted his own cable access television show, and who was given a lifetime achievement award from the Virginia State Bar’s family law section, remains unrepentant. His final bill for the divorce of Steve Firestone was $627,000, and he sought another $253,000 in interest for the case, which ended in 2004 without a trial less than a year from the time it was filed.
“He owed us more than that,” Lewis said in an interview last week. “We earned more than that. I feel as strongly today as I did the day we filed [suit], that Mr. Firestone owed every penny of it.”
Firestone said, “I thought that what I paid was egregiously high,” and he stopped paying shortly before his divorce was finalized. Then he received the lawsuit seeking another $500,000 five years later.
“I was shocked,” Firestone said. “If he won, we were going to be out on the street.”
Firestone hired DiMuro, who doesn’t do divorce law. But DiMuro obtained Lewis’s billing records and the records of the divorce, which he then handed over to Joseph Condo and Robert Shoun, two longtime family law practitioners.
Their conclusion: Not only were Lewis’s bills “flagrantly disproportionate to the value of the dispute,” DiMuro said, but Lewis’s settlement was a lousy deal. Firestone, through DiMuro, pursued Lewis for legal malpractice.
Firestone’s ex-wife had used Fairfax attorney David L. Duff for the divorce. Duff’s total bill: $73,000.
DiMuro noted that three lawyers from Lewis’s firm worked on Firestone’s case, and two lawyers often appeared at meetings or depositions that would normally be handled by one lawyer. In 2003, Lewis was only billing $575 an hour, while two young associates billed at rates closer to $250 an hour.
Lewis said Firestone was a difficult client, presenting numerous problems, and that comparing one side’s legal bills with the other’s is unfair. Firestone had tax problems, problems with his law practice, bookkeeping difficulties, suffered from depression and was intent on revenge against his wife, Lewis said.
But DiMuro said, “This was a garden-variety divorce with a modest estate for this area. No child custody issues. Their incomes were modest.” Besides their house in Fairfax County, the Firestones owned a small office condo and a few other assets. Firestone also had a $1.1 million inheritance from his parents, DiMuro said, which Lewis successfully kept separate from the marital estate.
Lewis said that’s a simplistic analysis. “This case presented so many more issues that were bigger than getting unmarried,” he said. “I had the high maintenance client.” He said Firestone signed a contract acknowledging that multiple lawyers might work on his case and that he had 30 days to challenge a bill, which he never did.
One of Firestone’s quirks was his heated denial that his wife had cancer, Lewis claimed. Lewis said he never really pursued the issue, and the case ended in July 2004. But several years later, in a casual conversation with Duff, he learned that Beverly Firestone had died of cancer not long after the divorce.
“My head exploded,” Lewis said. “I was sickened by that. I was horrified to think the case accelerated that. Nothing is more stressful than a divorce case. Stress kills.”
So, he sued Steve Firestone in October 2009.
Firestone said he never told Lewis his wife didn’t have cancer. “I told him I wondered if it was a ploy to increase my alimony exposure,” Firestone said.
In pretrial discovery, DiMuro obtained billing records for all of Lewis’s cases, not just the Firestone case. He found examples of days where Lewis billed for 39 hours; 31 hours; 40 hours; 71 hours.
Lewis said that was the result of “block billing,” in which he entered the time for many days all at once.
In a 16-month period in 2003 and 2004, DiMuro calculated in court records, Lewis billed his clients for 3,620 hours, or an average of 226 hours per month, or 7.4 hours per day, 365 days per year.
Lewis said he worked nights and weekends, in addition to his bar duties and television hosting.
As the suit progressed in Fairfax Circuit Court, Lewis’s lawyers angered Fairfax judges by failing to respond to basic requests and orders. The judges started slapping Lewis’s lawyers with financial sanctions. First $2,000. Then another $2,000. Then $5,000, $7,500 and finally a $10,515 hit after Lewis failed to appear for his deposition last month.
Lewis said his lawyer, Michael P. Freije, had released him from appearing, although he had been subpoenaed. Freije told Judge David S. Schell there had been a misunderstanding, but Schell was clearly upset and ordered Lewis to appear in DiMuro’s office the following week as well as pay the highly unusual fifth court-imposed sanction.
Lewis said he couldn’t be there, because of family obligations. Rather than defy the court, he said, he agreed to pay Firestone and settled the case.
FIVE SIMPLE STEPS TO PROVE ATTORNEY’S FEES
October 13, 2010 § 7 Comments
You would think that the award of an attorney’s fee would get special attention from both the client and the attorney. After all, the client is looking for some help with the financial burden, and the lawyer representing him is looking for some assurance that she will be paid. And one of the best ways to impress your client favorably is to hang your fees on the opposing party.
In many cases, though, I find that the lawyer takes a sort of slap-dash approach. Sometimes the lawyer confers with the other side and reaches a low-ball stipulation about a reasonable fee. Or the lawyer takes the witness stand (one of the very few occasions when an advocate is allowed to testify per Rule 3.7 of the Rules of Professional Conduct) and offers some general testimony in vague terms about a ballpark figure. Or the lawyer simply asks his client what she paid him and apparently thinks that will suffice.
Proving a reasonable attorney’s fee is actually a fairly simple process, but you need to cover all the points to make your client’s claim airtight. Before we talk about what you need to prove at trial, though, be sure you’ve done what you need to do before trial to lay a foundation for your claim:
- Record your time as you move toward trial, and have your time record printed neatly. You will need it for your testimony in court.
- Be sure there is a prayer for a reasonable attorney’s fee in your pleading. You are asking the court to take your opponent’s money, and that requires due process.
Now that the preliminaries are in order, here are the five steps to prove attorney’s fees:
- Be sure to have your client testify about his or her ability to pay. In divorce cases, ability to pay is the most critical consideration, and if you do not establish your client’s inability to pay, she will not be eligible for an award of an attorney’s fee. Deen v. Deen, 856 So.2d 736, 739 (Miss. App. 2003); Bates v. Bates, 755 So.2d 478, 482 (Miss. App. 1998). Even in a contempt case, where inability to pay is not required, you are wise to offer testimony about the financial effect of the contempt and the resulting attorney’s fees on your client, since an award of an attorney’s fee is not mandatory in contempt. Suess v. Suess, 718 So.2d 1126, 1129 (Miss. App. 1998). Remember that the ethical rules do not allow you as an advocate to testify about the contested merits of the case. If you are going to prove your client’s inability to pay, you will need your client’s testimony.
- Testify yourself about the prevailing rate charged by attorneys in the district. The award must be reasonable, and one of the key touchstones for reasonability is the usual and customary rate charged by attorneys in the district. But the prevailing rate is not binding on the court. The judge may award a fee at a greater or lesser rate if the circumstances warrant it. If you charged a rate different from the prevailing rate in the district, what rate did you charge and why? And if your rate exceeded the prevailing rate, what is your justification for doing so? Make your record.
- Put into evidence an itemization of the time you devoted to the case. Here’s where that itemized statement comes in. Identify it and ask that it be admitted into evidence. Before you do, though ask yourself: Is it credible? Does it look like a genuine fee statement that one would tender to a client for payment, or does it look like something you scratched together 5 minutes before setting foot in the courtroom? Are the times reported credible? Does it reflect charges for “one competent lawyer,” or are there charges included for others? Before you ever get to trial, pore over your statement and subject it to your own cross examination.
- Be sure to capture all the time in the case. Ask the court to take judicial notice of the time spent to that point in the trial, and estimate for the record how much more time will be needed to complete the trial. Estimate also the total number of hours that will be needed for any post-trial matters, such as drafting a judgment or preparing proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law.
- Address each and every one of the McKee factors. You can read more about the McKee factors here. The McKee factors govern the amount of the award, but as a practical matter, if you don’t prove them there is nothing in the record to determine what is reasonable, which means that a reward of zero is most likely. No matter how badly you and your client want that attorney’s fee award, if you don’t include proof of the McKee factors, you likely won’t get it.
TRIAL BY CHECKLIST: ATTORNEY’S FEES
July 9, 2010 § 20 Comments
A practice tip about trial factors is here.
If you are expecting an award of attorney’s fees in your case, you must put on proof of the quantity of work that was done to earn the fees, as well as the amount of the fees. In the case of McKee v. McKee, 418 So.2d 764, 767 (Miss. 1982), the Mississippi Supreme Court set out the following factors that must be considered by the court in determining the proper amount of attorney’s fees to be awarded:
- The parties’ relative financial ability;
- The skill and standing of the attorney;
- The novelty and difficulty of the issues;
- The degree of responsibility involved in management of the case;
- Time and labor;
- The usual and customary charge in the community;
- Preclusion of other employment as a result of accepting the case.
If McKee factor evidence is not submitted, the court may deny your prayer for attorney’s fee, and if the trial court does award it, it may be thrown out on appeal.
In a divorce case, an award of an attorney’s fee is properly made only to a party who proves inability to pay and there is proof of the McKee factors. In Turner v. Turner, 744 So.2d 332, 338 (Miss. App. 1999), the trial court’s award of attorney’s fees was reversed where no itemized account was introduced into evidence, and the only testimony of fees was that the fee charged was $1,500 and that the party seeking the award was unable to pay it.
In other cases, an award of attorney’s fees may be made regardless of ability to pay where the party is found in contempt, or is found guilty of dilatory behavior or behavior that causes the other party undue expense, or for frivolous litigation, or for unfounded allegations of domestic abuse. In such cases, the proof of attorney’s fees should be supported by proof of the McKee factors.
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