Harvey Miller and high fees go together

Harvey Miller.jpegThis Wall Street Journal ($) article reports that Harvey Miller — the New York attorney who built Weil, Gotshal & Manges‘ bankruptcy and corporate reorganization practice into a national dynamo before leaving the firm in 2002 to join Greenhill & Co. — is being accused of overbilling his client Loral Space & Communications Ltd. of as much as $3.6 million in the company’s recently concluded corporate reorganization case.
To add intrigue to the matter, Miller’s chief accuser is the creditors’ committee counsel in the Loral case, Akin, Gump, which incurred the wrath of Miller’s opinion last year in the Vermont bankruptcy case of FiberMark Inc., in which Miller concluded that the firm should forfeit a “significant portion” of its fees in that case because Akin, Gump gave allegedly biased advice to the FiberMark creditors’ committee. Akin, Gump is reportedly prepared to waive $1.5 million of its total remaining unpaid fee of $4.0 million in that case.
The challenge to Miller’s fee-charging is particularly interesting in that Miller was at the forefront of the movement to attract top-notch legal talent to the U.S. bankruptcy and reorganization legal field over the past 30 years. One of the ways that was accomplished was through the incorporation into the U.S. Bankruptcy Code of provisions that provide for attorneys to be compensated at the market rate for providing professional services to debtors in bankruptcy cases. For many years while at Weil, Miller’s hourly billing rate was among the highest of any attorney practicing bankruptcy law in the United States, and Weil’s fees for representing corporate debtors in a number of reorganization cases have been among the highest ever approved and paid. Those high fees are the genesis of the nickname for Weil, Gotshal & Manges among some envious members of the bankruptcy bar — “We’ll, Getcha & Mangle Ya.”
Update: The prescient Peter Lattman provides even more interesting background.

“You didn’t think we really meant that, did you?”

Enron Task Force.jpgDuring opening arguments last week in the criminal trial of former key Enron executives Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, Lay defense attorney Mike Ramsey made the following observation to the jury about the Enron Task Force’s indictment against the two men:

“This is the indictment . . .[It] is 66 pages long. Someday you may be called upon — God save you — to have to read it. If you do, you’ll find it is enormously complex. I don’t blame the [prosecutors] at the table here; I think their predecessors wrote it. But with all the power and precision of the English language, it is a babbling kind of indictment [that makes it] very hard to pin down, very hard to determine what you are actually charged with. . .”

Well, it turns out that that the Task Force pretty much agrees with Ramsey’s characterization of the indictment. In this motion that showed up on the docket of the case yesterday, the Task Force requests that U.S. District Judge Sim Lake not allow the Lay-Skilling defense to use the Task Force’s indictment during cross-examination of the Task Force’s witnesses in the trial because, among other things, to do so would risk “unfair prejudice, confusion of the issues [and] misleading the jury. . . ”
Not exactly a sterling self-endorsement of the Task Force’s writing skills, would you say? ;^)
Meanwhile, after the Task Force took almost all of Monday morning to complete direct examination of its first (and relatively minor) witness, Mark Koenig, cross-examination of Koenig continues today (Chronicle/Flood – Fowler; NY Times/Barrionuevo – Evans; WaPo/Carrie Johnson).