Firms Feasting on the Lehman Carcass

Weil Gotshal is slurping from the Lehman firehose. The firm put in a fee request for $55 million for its work as debtor’s counsel in the largest bankruptcy in history. The New York Times puts the colossal bill in context (remember, a $2 million a month engagement is generally considered large): 700 man hours per day, every day, for four and a half months straight.

Of course, the man at the center of it all is the other hero of the blog: Harvey Miller.  Harvey has billed just under 800 hours at $950 per, for a grand total of $755,060.  If you ever wondered why firms leverage up, this is why.  He worked his ass off for four months and that’s all he could generate directly.  But throw an army of worker-bee associates and paralegals at the matter and he’s got the lion’s share of a $55 million pie for himself and his partners.

Chart after the jump.

The total legal-fee requests came in at $84 million, which means Weil accounts for almost two thirds. The other notable billers:

Not surprisingly, since the firm represents the unsecured creditors’ committee, Milbank has the next highest total at $12.1 million.

AmLaw Daily notes a few other interesting tidbits: a large part of Simpson‘s fee was preparing Dick Fuld for his Congressional testimony; and the previously unheard-of Borstein Legal was a startup firm created by Lehman’s former technology counsel – which means he outsourced his job to himself. Nice work if you can get it.

Related posts:

1. Weil's Lehman Bill $63.75 Million and Counting
2. Lehman Fees Crack Half-Billion Mark
3. Jenner & Block Gets Lehman-Examiner Appointment
4. Weil Finally Getting Paid
5. The Firms Behind the Dear Investor Letters?

Tagged as: bankruptcy, lehman, milbank, simpson thacher, weil gotshal