As a very general proposition, if lawyers want to be taken seriously by clients they need to make sure that their professional conduct doesn’t offend the law. In circumstances where lawyers do offend professional laws, they should generally have ability to discern the legal consequences and to expeditiously mitigate the fallout to the firm and its branding through settlement.
No such luck for serial litigant Clayton Utz.
On 28 January, Justice Reid of the District Court of Queensland handed down the latest blow to Clayton Utz in a case that casts considerable doubt over the firm’s billing practices (to see the full decision click here). At issue in the case were the Clayton Utz billing narrations accompanying $399,844 worth of legal bills ($181,445 of which had already been paid).
In finding that Clayton Utz failed to provide its client with an “itemised bill” within the definition of s300 of the Legal Profession Act 2007 (QLD), Justice Reid made reference to a few highly questionable narrations
On 21 December 2009 a claim is made for 8.9 hours of work by a solicitor. The charge amounts to some $2,581, being 8.9 hours at $290 per hour. The following description is given of the work:
“Various activities including letter to Dibbs Barker re Mitchell Brandtman report; prepare response to show cause notice; peruse affidavits and email to counsel re same.”
…On 23rd December an entry from the same solicitor is made for 12.3 hours, amounting to some $3,567. The following description is given:
“Various activities including emails to and from L Willis re various issues; prepare response to show cause notice and confer with D Brackin re same; telephone out to L Willis re response to show cause notice; amend submissions; prepare bank guarantee letter, response to show cause notice letter and response to expert review notice letter; letter to Dibbs Barker re Michael Brandtman report; prepare for hearing; review amended submission, application and fresh affidavit of F Nardone; emails to and from F Nardone re hearing; emails to counsel briefing them with fresh material.”
The Judge went on to deliver a well-deserved swipe to the serial graduate abUtzer by observing:
In my view, the invoices are redolent of such generalised descriptions which are of little and sometimes no assistance to the client or to their current solicitors, even having regard to the client’s knowledge of the matter, information themselves of the need for an assessment.
Justice Reid ordered that Clayton Utz pay the Defendant’s costs of the application “to be agreed or failing agreement to be assessed”. Let’s hope Clutz offers proper narrations in any assesment of costs.
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A pet peeve is when the papers get this wrong: as a District Court judge, it is “Judge Reid”. You should know better!
about time someone looked into the billing practices of clayton utz. my intel is that the dodginess is a lot worse than thin time narrations…
My narrations look fairly similar to this person’s and no client has ever queried my bills in the 6 years I have been practising. I think they are fine and that this is a beat up.
I will personally die with laughter if I hear of a Clutz bill with “making cup of coffee” (1 unit) or such nonsense…
Time entries such as those recorded above are symptomatic of the immense pressure that junior lawyers at those firms experience when having to meet their budgets…
I started practice in Qld where it was drummed into us that it was professional misconduct if you were found to have overcharged. However, the experience in larger firms now is you’re told to write all time to file and “let god sort it out” as the firm tries to capture every conceivable unit of your day spent on a matter.
How much more terrible it must be in the larger firms to have to record X hours per day to budget that doesn’t get written off
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I feel sorry for the poor sod that is having their time entries put under the microscope. The entries could be those of any junior clutz lawyer – we are taught to bill in this manner.
From the charge out rate I can guess that it was a rotating grad. So the ludicrousness does not start with the number of hours that they apparently spent on the tasks, rather, it starts with the ridiculous hourly rate that clients are expected to fork out for, more often than not, the most junior and ill-experienced person in the team.
The number of hours is easily explained by the way in which brand new grads are instructed by clutz partners. They are given shitty instructions (more often than not, a forward with no instructions at all), they sit there for half an hour trying to figure out what they need to do, they spend 2 hours doing the wrong thing, they try to get some time with their partner, they finally get time with their partner, the partner explains what they were actually meant to do, they do what they were meant to do, 2 more rounds of the same and the end-result is (1) an email that the partner has re-worded and changed their mind about 6 times before it is sent to the client and (2) a junior that has spent all day on the task.
8.9 hours is not indicative of a junior that is incompetent or is fudging their time to make budget – it is just a result of poor delegation and management by the partners who come billing time glance at the figure on the prebill and sign it, and then only in circumstances where the client queries the billed amount do they consider whether time needs to be written off.
If you think the examples extracted in this article are bad, you should see some of the partner narrations that go out on bills I have seen “confer bloggs 1.5 units”, “agreement and email 4.5 units” – at $700+/h that is ridiculous!
Am I the only person who thinks that the narrations are absolutely fine? I’d hate for mine to go under the microscope …
Fair go Firmspy – every big firm’s narrations look exactly the sane, and often for much more senior lawyers too. I know of some extremely well respected firms where time is recorded by people for time they simply have not worked. So give up on the merciless Clutz bashing for a while. This happens at almost EVERY big firm.