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Court Blasts K&L Gates Team's Huge Fee and 'Unnecessary Lawyering'

By Robert J. Ambrogi

Is it excessive for lawyers to collect more than $800,000 in fees and costs from an estate valued at $1.2 million? Noting that would add up to 67 percent of the estate's total value, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court made no bones about its opinion on the fee request, saying that it represented "unnecessary lawyering." That does not mean that the lawyers from K&L Gates in Boston who made the request will go penniless. In an opinion issued yesterday, In the Matter of the Estate of Bartley J. King, the SJC sent the case back to the trial judge to decide a "fair and reasonable" fee award. But the court did not let go of the matter without first letting the litigants know its distaste for the fees requested. In the present case, a total of eighteen attorneys and paralegals were representing Folan, a remarkable number especially when one takes into account the motion judge's view that the theories advanced by the contestants were not "overly complex." Even a cursory review of the billing records suggests that among all these attorneys there was duplication of effort, and a fair amount of billing for the time of two or more attorneys...

Full post as published by Legal Blog Watch on January 28, 2010 (boomark / email).