Skip to main content

Lawyer's fees: Is this nuts or what?

Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., which set a record as the largest company to file for bankruptcy protection, is on course to yield one of the biggest bonanzas for lawyers.

So reports the Wall Street Journal. But wait, sit down and gulp as you read this:

"New York-based Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP earlier this week asked a federal bankruptcy judge in New York to sign off on a $55.1 million payment for its work representing Lehman."

The fee-payment request, filed Monday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, tallies work lawyers and other Weil staff members say they have performed between Sept. 15 and the end of January. The firm says it worked more than 100,000 billable hours during that period. Lead lawyer Harvey Miller is asking to be paid $950 for each of the nearly 795 hours he worked during the period.

An expense request that Weil also filed Monday includes more than $200,000 for business meals, $439,000 for computerized and "other" research, $115,000 on local transportation and $287,000 on duplicating charges, at 10 cents a page."

If this isn't utter madness and an indictment of corporations and lawyers gone mad........

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives?  In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t

The NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) goes on hold.....because of one non-Treaty member (Israel)

Isn't there something radically wrong here?    Israel, a non-signatory to the NPT has, evidently, been the cause for those countries that are Treaty members, notably Canada, the US and the UK, after 4 weeks of negotiation, effectively blocking off any meaningful progress in ensuring the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.    IPS reports ..... "After nearly four weeks of negotiations, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference ended in a predictable outcome: a text overwhelmingly reflecting the views and interests of the nuclear-armed states and some of their nuclear-dependent allies. “The process to develop the draft Review Conference outcome document was anti-democratic and nontransparent,” Ray Acheson, director, Reaching Critical Will, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), told IPS. “This Review Conference has demonstrated beyond any doubt that continuing to rely on the nuclear-armed states or their nuclear-dependent allies for l

#1 Prize for a bizarre story.....and lying!

No comment called for in this piece from CommonDreams: Another young black man: The strange sad case of 21-year-old Chavis Carter. Police in Jonesboro, Arkansas  stopped  him and two friends, found some marijuana, searched put Carter, then put him handcuffed  behind his back  into their patrol car, where they say he  shot himself  in the head with a gun they failed to find. The FBI is investigating. Police Chief Michael Yates, who stands behind his officers' story,  says in an interview  that the death is "definitely bizarre and defies logic at first glance." You think?