One bill logged 69 hours for a single attorney over a 24-hour stretch. A different firm had one person clocking 24+ hours on 15 separate occasions.<\/p>\n
Unless the Chicago Pope wants to rewrite the Gregorian calendar, that\u2019s going to be a problem.<\/p>\n
\u201cDoesn\u2019t the city have some sort of computer system to guard against paying bills like these?\u201d you might ask. And you\u2019d be on to something! Because the city of Chicago does indeed use CounselLink<\/a>, for the express purpose of flagging this kind of thing. Outside counsel must submit invoices electronically, and the software identifies invoices where a timekeeper logs more than 10 hours in a day to give the bureaucracy at opportunity to give the bills a second look.<\/p>\n And the software worked\u2026 the humans did not.<\/p>\n In the last decade, roughly 1,500 invoices got flagged by this 10-hour heuristic. The city reduced payment on 139 of them, and the remaining 90 percent or so got paid to the penny. And, of course, 10 hours is a conservative figure, especially for attorneys going to trial One invoice featured 162 separate instances of a staffer billing 10+ hours in a day during a trial month, which is a lot but within the realm of reasonable depending on the demands of the trial. <\/p>\n But the 10-hour flag is just the first step. The problem is that the city wasn\u2019t taking the second step of scrutinizing the TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR flag. Which is, when you think about it, the more important one. <\/p>\n All ethically compliant bills are alike; each 24+ hour bill is comical in its own way. Just two weeks ago<\/a>, an Australian court punished a lawyer for billing Broken Hill more than 30 hours in multiple single days. That lawyer defended himself citing dead dogs and international time zones. Back in 2013, an Ohio attorney who billed a 29-hour day<\/a> to the taxpayer-funded indigent defense system blamed record-keeping. A Biglaw partner had her license suspended for (among other things) entries<\/a> where she billed for depositions she didn\u2019t attend. A Dentons associate got caught billing 277 hours on a document review project<\/a> for 20 documents that nobody had opened.<\/p>\n More than half the overbilling episodes caught by the Tribune<\/em> were attributable to Borkan & Scahill. For its part, the firm said those clock-busting bills arose from multiple employees billing their time under a single timekeeper.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause of varying needs throughout the year, we do not input a dozen or more separate timekeeper codes for every single paralegal we use on every single file,\u201d the statement said. \u201cRather, we use the general timekeeper codes of our head paralegals to document these services on invoices.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n That is\u2026 not best practice. And the city agrees, with its outside counsel guidelines explicitly requiring invoices to list \u201cthe Name or Timekeeper ID of the person(s) who performed the work billed.\u201d Chicago even updated the guidelines in March<\/em> to specifically prohibit \u201c\u2018sharing\u2019 timekeeper accounts to bill multiple staff under one staff member\u2019s account.\u201d<\/p>\n While \u201chey, each person should probably bill their own time\u201d should be a simple rule to follow, the city doubtless imposes a byzantine set of guidelines upon outside counsel that incentivizes the sort of corner-cutting involved here. If it\u2019s going to take hours out of substantive work to get a second timekeeper approved\u2026 that\u2019s when firms will say \u201cjust slap that time under the pre-approved code.\u201d It\u2019s not good, but it\u2019s what happens when clients make life difficult. Everyone will point fingers over this reporting \u2014 because finger-pointing is fun \u2014 but they probably should all sit down together and hash out a better, more streamlined billing procedure that prevents these mistakes from ever coming up.<\/p>\n Or just commit to handling this work entirely in-house. One of the great scams of the ironically named \u201cfiscal conservatism\u201d movement that\u2019s held sway in this country for almost 50 years is the idea that government work gets cheaper when it\u2019s farmed out to the private sector and we\u2019re half a century into \u201cnope, apparently not!\u201d Even if one assumes the private sector performs more efficiently \u2014 a questionable prospect \u2014 those efficiency gains would have to be more<\/em> than what the firm needs to take in profit to succeed as a business. Chicago\u2019s reversed-conviction cases, per the Tribune<\/em>, cost taxpayers more per case than New York or L.A.<\/em><\/p>\n Well, Chicago has a solution to this overbilling problem!<\/p>\n Last fall, the law department began what it described as a pilot project for \u201cnew billing protocols and additional layers of review by introducing a third-party managed bill review service to improve invoice compliance.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n They hired another private contractor.<\/p>\n The post Chicago Paid Lawyers Billing 69 Hours In One Day<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n There are 24 hours in a day. Unless it happens to be one of the rare days when the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service applies an intercalary second, in which case there are 24 hours and one second in a day. But in no event is a day 69 hours long, though you wouldn\u2019t know that based on Chicago\u2019s legal bills. <\/p>\n The Chicago Tribune\u2019s<\/em> Joe Mahr and Jason Meisner<\/a> embarked on a deep dive into legal invoices paid by the city of Chicago to its stable of private law firms \u2014 specifically those handling federal civil rights cases defending the city from people who had their lives stolen by Chicago police misconduct. In its report, the Tribune found at least 40 instances where a firm billed for a timekeeper working more than 24 hours in a single day, all of which were dutifully paid in full. <\/p>\n One bill logged 69 hours for a single attorney over a 24-hour stretch. A different firm had one person clocking 24+ hours on 15 separate occasions.<\/p>\n Unless the Chicago Pope wants to rewrite the Gregorian calendar, that\u2019s going to be a problem.<\/p>\n \u201cDoesn\u2019t the city have some sort of computer system to guard against paying bills like these?\u201d you might ask. And you\u2019d be on to something! Because the city of Chicago does indeed use CounselLink<\/a>, for the express purpose of flagging this kind of thing. Outside counsel must submit invoices electronically, and the software identifies invoices where a timekeeper logs more than 10 hours in a day to give the bureaucracy at opportunity to give the bills a second look.<\/p>\n And the software worked\u2026 the humans did not.<\/p>\n In the last decade, roughly 1,500 invoices got flagged by this 10-hour heuristic. The city reduced payment on 139 of them, and the remaining 90 percent or so got paid to the penny. And, of course, 10 hours is a conservative figure, especially for attorneys going to trial One invoice featured 162 separate instances of a staffer billing 10+ hours in a day during a trial month, which is a lot but within the realm of reasonable depending on the demands of the trial. <\/p>\n But the 10-hour flag is just the first step. The problem is that the city wasn\u2019t taking the second step of scrutinizing the TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR flag. Which is, when you think about it, the more important one. <\/p>\n All ethically compliant bills are alike; each 24+ hour bill is comical in its own way. Just two weeks ago<\/a>, an Australian court punished a lawyer for billing Broken Hill more than 30 hours in multiple single days. That lawyer defended himself citing dead dogs and international time zones. Back in 2013, an Ohio attorney who billed a 29-hour day<\/a> to the taxpayer-funded indigent defense system blamed record-keeping. A Biglaw partner had her license suspended for (among other things) entries<\/a> where she billed for depositions she didn\u2019t attend. A Dentons associate got caught billing 277 hours on a document review project<\/a> for 20 documents that nobody had opened.<\/p>\n More than half the overbilling episodes caught by the Tribune<\/em> were attributable to Borkan & Scahill. For its part, the firm said those clock-busting bills arose from multiple employees billing their time under a single timekeeper.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause of varying needs throughout the year, we do not input a dozen or more separate timekeeper codes for every single paralegal we use on every single file,\u201d the statement said. \u201cRather, we use the general timekeeper codes of our head paralegals to document these services on invoices.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n That is\u2026 not best practice. And the city agrees, with its outside counsel guidelines explicitly requiring invoices to list \u201cthe Name or Timekeeper ID of the person(s) who performed the work billed.\u201d Chicago even updated the guidelines in March<\/em> to specifically prohibit \u201c\u2018sharing\u2019 timekeeper accounts to bill multiple staff under one staff member\u2019s account.\u201d<\/p>\n While \u201chey, each person should probably bill their own time\u201d should be a simple rule to follow, the city doubtless imposes a byzantine set of guidelines upon outside counsel that incentivizes the sort of corner-cutting involved here. If it\u2019s going to take hours out of substantive work to get a second timekeeper approved\u2026 that\u2019s when firms will say \u201cjust slap that time under the pre-approved code.\u201d It\u2019s not good, but it\u2019s what happens when clients make life difficult. Everyone will point fingers over this reporting \u2014 because finger-pointing is fun \u2014 but they probably should all sit down together and hash out a better, more streamlined billing procedure that prevents these mistakes from ever coming up.<\/p>\n Or just commit to handling this work entirely in-house. One of the great scams of the ironically named \u201cfiscal conservatism\u201d movement that\u2019s held sway in this country for almost 50 years is the idea that government work gets cheaper when it\u2019s farmed out to the private sector and we\u2019re half a century into \u201cnope, apparently not!\u201d Even if one assumes the private sector performs more efficiently \u2014 a questionable prospect \u2014 those efficiency gains would have to be more<\/em> than what the firm needs to take in profit to succeed as a business. Chicago\u2019s reversed-conviction cases, per the Tribune<\/em>, cost taxpayers more per case than New York or L.A.<\/em><\/p>\n Well, Chicago has a solution to this overbilling problem!<\/p>\n Last fall, the law department began what it described as a pilot project for \u201cnew billing protocols and additional layers of review by introducing a third-party managed bill review service to improve invoice compliance.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n They hired another private contractor.<\/p>\n The post Chicago Paid Lawyers Billing 69 Hours In One Day<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are 24 hours in a day. Unless it happens to be one of the rare days when the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service applies an intercalary second, in which case there are 24 hours and one second in a day. But in no event is a day 69 hours long, though you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-149252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-above_the_law"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149252\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\n
\n![\"Headshot\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/abovethelaw.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/Headshot-300x200.jpg?resize=188%2C125&ssl=1\" "\\"\\"")
Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n
\n
\nJoe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n