Expert Legal Fee Witnesses
on High-Stakes Attorney Fee Disputes
Testifying
witness for trials. For
high-states litigation, we suggest Leonard Bucklin (the author of our text
Attorney Fee Awards: a handbook) as a
legal fees testifying expert. He does a detailed analysis
and testifies with the skills of a superior communicator. (Bucklin normally limits his
engagements to disputes in which the claimed legal fees
exceed one million dollars.) Bucklin is a member of the Fee Practice Group of
the National Association of Legal Fee Analysis.
for attorney fee
expert witness
Fees auditor. You may not want a testifying expert, but only an auditor to arm you with facts so that you yourself can negotiate a fee dispute to resolution. Or, a testifying expert (such as Bucklin) may want to have a legal fees auditor do back office computations, recording into usable forms and tables each hour charged on a time entry. Why? Because there is a lot of detailed item by item computation underneath a proper expert opinion, and in cases with thousands of time entries, there is a need for the use of additional back-office personnel armed with the software, procedures, and expertise to properly do the categorization into legal tasks done and the computation of the time the billing attorney recorded as taking for specific tasks.
One of our recommendations for an auditor of legal time records and the resulting fee bills is Accountability Services., Inc. Founded in 1991, Accountability Services has served businesses of all sizes, including Fortune 500 Companies and governmental organizations. The principal of Accountability Services is Judith A. Bronsther, Esq., who has written on the subject of legal cost control, and who lectures on the subject. For more information contact Accountability Services, Inc., 853 Broadway, Suite 1607 New York, NY 10107 (212.245.0245).
Another of our recommendations for an auditor of legal time records and the resulting fee bills is Sterling Analytics, headed by David Paige. Sterling Analytics has a sizeable employee base and computational base because of its substantial involvement with large corporations in auditing the legal fee bills the corporation receives, with benchmarking against industry best-practices, and implementation of strategies to enforce cost controls. For the purposes of an expert witness testifying at trial, Sterling Analytics has the abilities do to the required categorization into legal tasks done and the computation of the time the billing attorney recorded as taking for specific tasks.
In high-stakes litigation --- Win! On whichever side of the counsel table you are. If you want to win your attorney fee dispute, on either side of the counsel table you are, consider the testifying expert of the Bucklin . Organization, to get solid, battle-ready, opinions of reasonable time expenditures and reasonable dollars of attorney fee amounts. Consider also expert fees auditors which do detailed examination using established procedures and expertise to get the facts of the time recorded as devoted to specific tasks.
