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Thompson Hine LLP, a full-service business law firm with approximately 400 lawyers in 11 offices, was ranked number 1 in the category “Most innovative North American law firms: New working models” by The Financial Times and was 1 of 7 firms shortlisted for The American Lawyer’s inaugural Legal Services Innovation Award. The firm has been recognized by the National Law Journal as a Legal Technology Trailblazer and featured by Bloomberg for its innovative service delivery models, which drive accuracy and predictability. The firm’s commitment to innovation is embodied in Thompson Hine SmartPaTHTM – a smarter way to work – predictable, efficient and aligned with client goals. For more information, please visit ThompsonHine.com and ThompsonHine.com/SmartPaTH.

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<img style="max-width: 100%;height: auto;max-width: 100%;height: auto" loading="lazy" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-4747" src="https://www.thelawforlawyerstoday.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/754/2019/12/2020-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200">If you&rsquo;re making a New Year&rsquo;s resolution to improve your time-keeping and billing habits, you can draw inspiration from this cautionary tale, detailing how a Massachusetts lawyer, a partner&nbsp;at a large firm, has been suspended for six months for overbilling clients at her prior firm.
3,000+ billable hours?!
As widely <a href="http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/biglaw-partner-who-said-she-worked-3173-billable-hours-is-suspended-for-overbilling">reported</a>, the partner&rsquo;s prior firm started investigating her 2015 time charges after she reported working 3,173 billable hours and more than 720 nonbillable hours.&nbsp; According to the disciplinary <a href="http://filehost.thompsonhine.com/uploads/bd19-006_5c65.pdf">opinion</a>, the hours were not based on contemporaneous timekeeping.&nbsp; Instead, the partner had her assistant create billing reports.&nbsp; To do that, said the opinion,&nbsp; the lawyer&rsquo;s assistant would try to find and gather together notebooks the partner kept.&nbsp; Then, the assistant &ldquo;also would review the respondent&rsquo;s calendar, correspondence files, pleading binders, and electronic mail messages.&nbsp; She then would create a &lsquo;weekly time report&rsquo; for the tasks the assistant believed the respondent had performed, as reflected in those documents.&rdquo;&nbsp; The partner would then review the drafts and make handwritten changes.&nbsp; Often, this process would jog the partner&rsquo;s memory and she would add charges that had not been reflected in her e-mail, calendar or notepads, she said.
The partner also allocated or re-allocated her own time to associates.&nbsp; She testified at the disciplinary hearing that this was partly because she had carried out tasks that were more appropriate for&nbsp;an associate, or because the client&rsquo;s guidelines would not permit more than one lawyer to attend a deposition, for example.&nbsp; She also said that she sometimes added her own recalled time to an associate&rsquo;s time-charge because &ldquo;she believed that &lsquo;creating [her] own new entry would have been an administrative burden that would then have required all of the draft bills to be re-run and that she &lsquo;was always being pressured to get [her] bills done.&rsquo;&rdquo;
After the investigation, the partner left her prior firm; all but one of her clients followed her to her new firm.&nbsp; The prior firm decided to return or credit to clients $260,000 in estimated overbilling.
At the hearing, it was undisputed that the partner was a hard worker, and that her clients were happy with the excellent results she achieved for them.&nbsp; One even repurposed its fee refund and devoted it to a staff party, and invited the partner to attend.
But the disciplinary hearing panel was not so sanguine about&nbsp;the partner&rsquo;s&nbsp;conduct.&nbsp; It found&nbsp;that she&nbsp;violated the state&rsquo;s versions of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibility/publications/model_rules_of_professional_conduct/rule_1_5_fees/">Model Rule 1.5(a)</a> by charging a clearly excessive fee through charging more time than she actually worked and <a href="https://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibility/publications/model_rules_of_professional_conduct/rule_8_4_misconduct/">Model Rule 8.4(c)</a> by conduct reflecting dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation.&nbsp; The reviewing board, and in turn the intermediate court of appeals, agreed.
The court particularly noted that &ldquo;Client satisfaction does not preclude finding fees &lsquo;excessive&rsquo;&rdquo; within the meaning of the ethics rules.
If I could save time in a bottle....
Like Jim Croce sang, you can&rsquo;t capture time in a bottle, but you can and should&nbsp;keep contemporaneous time records and&nbsp;use them as the basis for billing your client whenever&nbsp;an engagement calls for hourly billing.&nbsp;&nbsp;There are scads of software programs that can help&nbsp;you do that &mdash; or use pencil and paper.
Trying to recreate days or weeks&nbsp;of time entries based on vague clues about what you might have been doing is a sure way to cheat yourself out of potentially billable time &mdash; or, as the court found here, to cheat the client by overbilling.&nbsp; (It can also&nbsp;lead to staff burn-out.&nbsp; You can only sympathize with the&nbsp;partner&rsquo;s assistant who had to try to recreate her time.)&nbsp; Mark-ups, re-allocations, billing for your own perceived value of the time &ndash; all are inappropriate&nbsp;and can subject you and your&nbsp;firm to a whole range of problems, as it did in this case.
The partner in this case has not heard the last of it:&nbsp; The professional conduct board is appealing the six-month suspension order and seeking a stiffer penalty.
Start 2020 off on the right foot with good time-keeping practices.

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Ethics

Legal Ethics, Professional Responsibility and the Business of Law

Overbilling based on reconstructed time charges leads to suspension for Bay State lawyer