Challenging Attorney’s Fees

Our office has a video that helps clients challenge fees of their former attorneys. Most clients who try to do that either by fee arbitration or in court takes a self-defeating approach in that they claim their lawyer charged them too much and should have done more work on their case. Unfortunately for them, it is self-contradictory to say that the lawyer charged too much (did too much work) and should have done more.

Instead of those generalized complaints, our video shows how to attack the specifics of attorney bills. For example, “lumping” is the practice of including more than one item in a billing entry. If an attorney bills for “conference with client and draft letter to opposing counsel,” the client cannot determine how much time was billed for the conference and how much for the letter. This practice is disapproved by the bar association.

The video calls attention to the State Bar’s advisory on “how to detect bill padding” and the video demonstrates how the practice can be devastating to a client.

People who’ve used the video have often said that it helped and they were happy with the result of fee arbitration where they followed our advice—even though the video is low tech, the content is high quality.