Your Trusted Bill Review Partner
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ):
What is the upfront cost?
There is no upfront cost to you. Our fee of 2.5% is applied to the total invoice audited, and you only pay after our work is completed.
What if my lawyer works on retainer?
Even if your legal counsel operates on a retainer, billable hours remain a critical aspect for review. While the retainer is a prepaid expense, it shouldn’t be depleted by inflated billables. Empirical is equipped to audit and negotiate various fee structures, including traditional hourly arrangements with agreed upon rate for different personnel, Alternative Fee Arrangements, Flat Fee Structures, as well as Capped Fees (an agreed-upon maximum cost or “cap” for a specific matter).
What if I plan to seek an attorney fee award, forcing the other party to pay my legal fees?
While attorney fee awards are possible, albeit rare, it is still critical to manage your legal spend through the duration of your litigation. An example is from the 2021 litigation involving Jeff Bezos’ defamation claim. At the conclusion of the case, Bezos was awarded attorney fees, which required the other party to pay his legal fees, with instruction from the Court to submit Bezos’ counsel’s billables.
Counsel submitted billables totaling $1.7M. After conducting an outside audit, the Court ruled that the number of lawyers and hours billed were unreasonable. Bezos was ultimately awarded $218,385 in legal fees. A sharp decline from the original $1.7M requested. This significant reduction underscores the necessity of carefully managing your legal expenses throughout litigation, even when pursuing a fee award.
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Does engaging bill review impede my lawyer’s ability to do their job?
Legal bill review services are critical in an otherwise unchecked market. We’re here to keep your firms honest; not bankrupt them.
Employing a team of licensed U.S.-based lawyers, we understand the grind of litigation and appreciate that sometimes, long and arduous hours are necessary to get the job done right. However, we also recognize that corporate clients are not particularly equipped to identify excessive or inflated billing, or articulate necessary arguments to bring down those excessive charges. Having a team of licensed lawyers, who have litigated throughout the United States, is critical to ensuring that you are getting the results you need without the fear of being overcharged for a much needed service.
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Is legal bill review really necessary?
To illustrate the importance of detailed bill review, consider a few examples of excessive billing we've identified:
* An attorney billed between 23 and 27.8 hours in a single 24-hour period for three consecutive days.
* A law firm submitted duplicate invoices totaling over $2.1 million over six months, an error unnoticed by the client's accounting team until our audit.
* An attorney billed for travel to seven separate hearings at the same courthouse on the same day, charging for the trip seven times despite only traveling once.
* A firm billed for 14 attorneys to attend a hearing, with nine of them present merely as observers without contributing to the proceedings.
* A paralegal billed 0.6 hours, per document, to draft 27 form documents by simply changing the date and name, resulting in a total charge of 16.2 hours for work that should typically take around 2.7 hours, representing a 600% inflated charge.
These examples, while only representing a fraction of the excessive billing our auditors have identified, highlight the potential for significant overbilling and the value that a thorough legal bill review can provide.