Legal Fee Auditing, Negotiation and Recovery of Excessive Fees

Why Businesses need this service:

• Abusive Practices are common.

Corporations are commonly abused by excessive, unethical and illegal legal billing.

The abuses in this area are legendary.  A few examples:

• Charging over cost for photocopies, faxes, messenger services and overtime, creating profit centers from law firm "overhead";
• Charging for clerical work at lawyers' steep hourly rates;
• Billing for creating or reviewing bills;
• Using multiple attorneys to accomplish work generally completed by a single lawyer;
• Personal charges by counsel for in-room movies and mini-bar refreshments during travel;
• Recycling work product from other clients, and charging as if the work is newly created;
• Attending a court hearing at the same time that the attorney is fully billing other clients for other court hearings at the same courthouse;
• Billing 23 hours per day;
• Billing in large "blocks" so that a client cannot tell how the work was actually accomplished;
• Large "minimum" billing segments [such as a minimum 15 minutes for a 1 minute e-mail]

A Cost-Effective Solution;

• Recovery of Excessive Fees through Evaluation and Negotiation

There is widespread discontent with legal billing practices. Major corporations have tried every conceivable solution, including the "crunching" of legal bills through various software vendors, to resorting to the imposition of lengthy, complex "billing guidelines." These strategies offer only limited relief from the spiraling costs of litigation.

Instead, Sterling offers an analytical approach, providing cost-effective relief to this problem.

How we Evaluate and Negotiate Fee Issues

Our legal fee auditing team is supervised by an attorney with over 20 years of experience as a litigator and manager of several law firms. He has isolated legal precedent, guidelines and ethical standards that compel law firms to significantly modify improper billing practices.  Lack of adherence to these standards is widespread, generally resulting in a savings of at least 20% on litigation billings over $100,000.

Legal bills are analyzed using our internal systems to identify improper charges.  We then enter into negotiations with law firms to obtain volunteer reductions of returns of improper charges.  Most firms are ultimately cooperative with this process, however a few firms may respond to an examination of their bills by contending that:

• They have brought enough "value" to the client to justify the fee;
• The client has accepted these questionable practices for years and there is no need or justification for change;
• They are offended that their billing structure would be questioned;
• The auditing process and analysis violates attorney-client privilege because confidential information has been shared with non-attorneys;
• The corporation's general counsel is somehow disloyal to the law firm by undertaking this analysis;

We Deal Effectively with all Objections.

Our audit process is fair, independent,cost effective and maintains attorney-client privileged because it is conducted by an independent attorney, retained by the corporation. Having been through this process a number of times, I am confident that we will succeed in achieving fee reductions by negotiation at least 80% of the time.

Getting Started

Sterling charges for its services based upon both hourly and success-based models.  We generally stage our retainer so that the customer can pay for results as they are achieved.  We would be please to consult on a privileged, initially cost-free basis in response to enquiries.

To Find Out More: Call David Paige, Esq. at 516-417-5129 or via e-mail: dpaige@sterlingrisk.com