Pages

Friday, February 15, 2013

Attorney Bills Time . . . for Billing his Time - COTW #130

The Supreme Court of North Dakota suspended an attorney for engaging in a number of questionable practices, including:
[F]ailing to timely respond to his clients' request for information concerning the status of the bankruptcy and for a bill; charging unreasonable fees when Kitchen's bill included an hour of time to retrieve the file from storage and six hours of time to prepare the bill itself; failing to maintain the requisite degree of documentation to permit identification of trust account transactions and the periodic balances on hand for each client; failing to submit the requisite records to the Wisconsin Office of Lawyer Regulation to assist in its investigation; and misleading the Wisconsin Office of Lawyer Regulation by suggesting on several occasions that he was sending the necessary documentation but later conceding that he did not have it.
I see . . . so seven hours to pull the file and prepare the bill!? Apparently that's frowned upon in North Dakota. I'm hardly an expert in 50-state law regarding the rules of professional conduct, but I can't imagine that flies anywhere.

HT: Legal Profession Blog - Billing Six Hours for Preparing Bill is Unreasonable.

1 comment:

  1. I see . . . so seven hours to pull the file and prepare the bill!? Apparently that's frowned upon in North Dakota. I'm hardly an expert in 50-state law regarding the rules of professional conduct, but I can't imagine that flies anywhere.


    You are mistaken. This type of crap is fa far more common than one would think. Sounds like the court in North Dakota is doing their job, which is far from a foregone conclusion.

    ReplyDelete