What are common attorney billing practices?
A. Some of them include padding such as additional and extraordinary services, notes, e-mail’s and letters to staff and associates, periodic reviews of materials, excessive “research”, long story telling sessions, copied and tailored memo / petition template billing, excessive waiting room time, letters to staff, dreamed up time, staff conferences, submitting additional bills outside of fixed fee agreements and engagement letters. Others include bogus travel and inflamed office expenses and fees. “Billed legal ‘research’ is at times free legal training for attorneys.” It’s been know in this area that they sometimes count all of the “active” cases that they have, and bill research time to all of them in the same hour (aka double billing). If you take for example 25 or more cases and multiply that by $160 per hour, per case, your lawyer would have just self-dealed themselves $4,000.00 or more for that particular hour while they were out on the river or at the mall with their kids. They f
