We are continuing to analyze Wells Fargo’s counsel’s bills. Aside from identical billing entries for both identical or differing amounts, it seems that the firm may have figured out a way to recoup its investment, then waste it, on electronic discovery aids.
There are a number of paired entries where one legal assistant bills a .10 or .20 to tell another legal assistant to input documents into a Summation database. Summation, like the program our firm uses, Caselogistix, is a database that enables the law firm to categorize and search discovery documents, among other things. Then the second paralegal bills for importing the documents into the database and categorizing them.
The irony? I could see no laptop computer on the other side of the table. Summation has “briefcasing” abilities that allows the entire database, including the word index, to be saved on a laptop and used at trial. Caselogistix has the same functionality and I had my client’s entire database on my laptop. The other side, however, had a collection of banker’s boxes and no laptop in use that I could see. Whenever there was a document issue, I could see the senior associate leafing through the exhibit notebooks (one 4 incher and one 3 incher) trying to find a document to address the question. Again, no laptop.
Clients should not be paying for such inefficiency. I had Wells Fargo’s entire notebook in electronic form on my laptop. It was in a pdf file and I could word search it. I had better searching capabilities of Wells Fargo’s exhibit book than Wells Fargo did.
Wake up, corporate America. If you publish a billing policy, enforce it. I represent corporations with billing policies. I follow them. I have clients with e-billing and UTBMS codes. Most billing policies I’ve seen, other than one client that actually was part of FedEx, prohibit the routine use of overnight delivery services. But the fee affidavit I referred to was sent to me by email around 3:30 on Friday afternoon and then a hard copy was sent “Priority Overnight” for delivery Monday morning. I received it before 9:00 a.m. For what reason? Wells Fargo shouldn’t pay for this waste and neither should my client as the recipient of the fee application.
Dear reader (readers?), please instruct your staff about the judicious use of overnight delivery. If I am sent an email, what requirement is there to send a Priority Overnight FedEx, unless you have family members whose incomes depend on the success of FedEx?
I have represented very large corporations, and still do. But there are people within some corporations who seem to feel that a large law firm, with all of its inefficiencies, is the only way to get effective representation. Or the in-house decision-maker feels a large law firm provides “cover.” But when they do this, and pay the bills that contain obvious wastes of resources, how will a law firm ever become more efficient? Paying the bills of a firm that uses Summation in the office but not at trial, but instead sends a high-priced associate to manage the paper, rewards inefficiency. Most firms I represent will not allow two lawyers to attend a hearing without prior permission. Was there permission?
This was a $200,000 collection case. My firm has two lawyers and a paralegal. Wells Fargo is an enormous corporation. Did they think I was going to outgun them with my “vast” resources from the world HQ in Jupiter, FL? At one point they had five people working on this file. That’s two more people than I have in my firm. The staffing on this file was ridiculous as was the billing.
That’s the incredulous view of one lawyer from Jupiter, Florida. I’m Marc Dobin and I billed no one for this blog entry.
