Posted on 04/17/2013 8:15:19 AM PDT by AtlasStalled
The Association of Corporate Counsel is challenging the apparent practice by at least some plaintiffs' firms of using temporary attorneys as profit centers in class actions as reported by Daniel Fisher for Forbes.
The 30,000-member trade group has filed a letter with a Manhattan federal court which must approve a $100 million fee request by trial lawyers who negotiated a $590 million settlement in a securities action against Citigroup, and contends that the high rates sought for the temporary lawyers are "beyond what a reasonable, paying client would be willing to pay."
In class action lawsuits a substantial portion of the attorneys' fees often are generated by billing out tempory lawyers from staffing agencies at substantially higher rates than they are paid for their typically perfunctory document review work.
The document review process generally involves both objective and subjective coding components. The objective component simply entails inputting bibliographical data from the document -- such as date, title, author, recipients -- onto a coding sheet or into a database, and the subjective component involves substantive analysis which includes issue spotting, determining relevancy, and providing comments for the document.
It is questionable whether temporary attorneys should be used for the objective coding of documents which seemingly is little more than clerical work. Indeed, some law firms outsource the objective coding portion of a document review to data entry service providers, and perhaps appropriately use the temporary lawyers with their much higher billing rates only for the subjective coding component; however, some plaintiffs' class action firms in many cases -- including Milberg LLP in In re Tyco International, Ltd. Securities Litigation -- have used temporary attorneys for both the objective and subjective coding portions of the document review.
Athough the plaintiffs firms in the Citigroup case insist the contract attorneys did not engage in objective coding the nature of their work nevertheless does not warrant the high rates according to Ted Frank, the founder of the Center for Class Action Fairness, who has objected to the fee request pursuant to filings with the court dated December 20, 1012 and March 15, 2013 in which he alleges that amount sought is inflated by tens of millions "by overstating 'prevailing market rates' for contract attorneys doing document review."
Three piece suited land sharks in a feeding frenzy.
up until recently temporary agencies were not allowed to place lawyers. It was a regulation issue since only law firms with their lawyer only owners were subject to bar regulation. Temp agencies were non-lawyers and not allowed to regulate legal decisions.
Even non-compete clauses are not allowed.
this is part of the robosigning issue.
You hire a warm body attorney to rubberstamp “inspecting” and approving all the defective files assembly line style.
usually no experience, fresh out of school lawyers being told how to practice law by non-lawyers.
They should be careful. The judge might ask them what rates their member corporations pay their litigators. Those big law firms have their associates do the same kind of scut work.
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