Legal News

Let The Bad Times Roll; Weil to Get Nearly $50 Million In Lehman

By Ashby Jones

WSJ bankruptcy reporter Mike Spector ginned up this nice post for the WSJ’s Deal Journal just a few minutes ago on fees to be paid in the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy.

The takeaway, if you’re too busy read much further on this August Friday afternoon: Weil Gotshal & Manges is, yes, getting nearly $50 million for a four-and-a-half-month period of work starting in September of last year.

We blogged about Weil’s request in April — and actually wrote a page-one WSJ story on it. Weil asked for $55.1 million for those four months of work.

On Thursday, the judge presiding over the case, James Peck, approved Weil’s request in full, giving his blessing on some $49.63 million (the remaining 10% is subject to a “holdback” for later disbursement by the bankruptcy court). Weil will also get all of its requested $1.34 million in expenses reimbursed. The awarded fees amount to about $357,000 a day for Weil, or nearly $15,000 an hour. For that, bankruptcy guru Harvey Miller helped the fallen financial giant unload most of its deteriorating assets to Barclays in a matter of days, one of the speediest bankruptcy deals on record. Click here for Judge Peck’s order; scroll to Exhibit A for the list of firms

In total, Judge Peck approved more than than $96 million in fees for Wall Street law firms and restructuring shops working on the case.

Behind Weil, Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, which represents Lehman's official unsecured creditors' committee, received $10.92 million in fees. Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle got $4.2 million. Curtis handles matters for Lehman when Weil has a conflict of interest. Jones Day received only $1.13 million in fees. Jones Day is representing Lehman in a probe of Barclays over whether the U.K. bank underpaid for Lehman's assets in September's hasty deal.

A "fee committee" led by Kenneth Feinberg, the Obama administration's pay czar, reviewed fee and expense requests and found few problems. The committee determined only $223,262 out of the more than $96 million in fees didn't pass muster. The committee flagged some expenses as inadequately described, but found only about $75,000 of $2.77 million in expenses to be inappropriate.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on August 14, 2009 (boomark / email).