Judge Slashes Fee Request for WilmerHale and Wiley Rein
Updated: A federal judge has slashed an attorney fee request in a false claims suit from $20 million to a little more than $7.5 million. His opinion explaining his action takes aim at fees charged by the two plaintiffs’ firms, WilmerHale and Wiley Rein.
Chief U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth of the District of Columbia made his observations in a false claims suit with a $90 million recovery, Legal Times reports.
One part of Lamberth’s opinion (PDF posted by Legal Times) turned down a request to compensate WilmerHale associates at a higher rate because of their superior skill. “Simply put, these superstars already bill at superstar rates,” Lamberth writes.
He also rejected suggestions that WilmerHale endeavored to keep the number of lawyers working on the case as low as possible. “By no rational definition of the term do 52 attorneys constitute a ‘small’ team of lawyers,” he wrote.
WilmerHale’s co-managing partner, William Perlstein, told Legal Times in a story published Friday that the firm had worked on the case for nearly 10 years and it was a success, despite the fee ruling.
Perlstein points out that the fee request was for $9.9 million plus enhancements that brought the total to $20 million. “The enhancement standard is a difficult one to meet, so this is still a great success,” he told the publication. “We were comfortable in asking for the fees to be doubled because of the risk we took in working on this case. We knew this was on our dime, and we had to be careful ourselves in our staffing decisions. We knew our recovery was totally dependent on our winning.”
Updated on Aug. 15 to include information from the new Legal Times story.
