Another Big Law Firm Accused of Over-Billing

The law firm K&L Gates, a billion dollar firm of about 2,000 attorneys headquartered in Pittsburgh, was recently sued by Chicora Life Center, a mental healthy facility in South Carolina whose ownership has been connected with Donald Trump, Jr.. The main allegation? That K&L Gates ran up $1.6 million in fees in only six months.

While allegations of over-billing are frequent with Big Law firms, what was particularly interesting was that “According to the suit, a lawyer within K&L Gates reported to Chicora that the law firm hosts an annual seminar in Phoenix for lawyers to learn various ways to increase their billing. The suit claims that K&L Gates used these techniques to increase billing.”

In other words, that allegations seem to imply that systematic over-billing by the firm is not only condoned, it’s encouraged. If true, that has to make the firm’s clients wonder about the firm’s sense of fiduciary duty and whose best interests the firm truly has in mind.

According to the ABA, the over-billing includes:

• Block billing, in which lawyers aggregate multiple smaller tasks into a single block entry. Such billing can inflate total hours billed to a client by up to 30%, the suit says, citing information from a State Bar of California arbitration advisory on detecting bill padding.

• Hoarding, in which an overqualified professional with a high billing rate retains work that could be passed on to lower-paid professionals. “Often, hoarding results in partners doing associate work, associates doing paralegal work, and/or paralegals doing clerical work,” the suit says.

• Multibilling, which occurs when multiple attorneys perform the same task or attend the same event when one lawyer could handle the task.

While it remains to be seen what the outcome of the lawsuit will be, as well as the veracity of the allegations, this lawsuit serves as a reminder for every single client of every single lawyer to be conscious of what they are being billed. While hiring a lawyer is not an inexpensive proposition, it should not mean being ripped-off.