Biglaw

Biglaw Partner's Suspension Quadrupled On Appeal Following Fraudulent Billing Scandal

The order says 'clients were intentionally, dishonestly, and excessively billed for the time.'

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Doreen Zankowski

Timesheets are the bane of almost every law firm attorney’s life. Keeping track of your work time in six-minute increments can be a time-consuming and tedious affair. We all know it’s important since that’s how firms get paid, but that doesn’t mean an attorney can be lax in their ethical obligations.

Back in 2019, we told you about the hot water Duane Morris partner Doreen Zankowski was in. The issue stems from her time at Saul Ewing — specifically her time entry in 2015, the year she made equity partner. Zankowski billed 3,173 hours and worked more than 720 non-billable hours that year, but during a compensation review, the firm became concerned with her hours. And though Zankowski left Saul Ewing in 2016 and joined Duane Morris, the investigation into her timesheets continued.

According to the initial ethics opinion, Zankowski “falsely inflated the number of hours on final bills sent to several clients, improperly entered her time as work by her associates, and knowingly billed clients for taking depositions that she did not attend.” And though the board of bar overseers recommended a two-year suspension, Associate Justice Frank Gaziano felt that was “too severe” and knocked it down to six months. In justifying the shorter suspension, Gaziano also noted even absent the billing irregularities, Zankowski was a significant revenue generator and that her evidence that the overbilling was unintentional was compelling.

But after an appeal to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the suspension was quadrupled to two years, as reported by Law360:

[Associate Justice David A.] Lowy — writing for a four-judge panel of the top court — increased the penalty to two years on Thursday.

“Our focus, however, is not on the quantum of excessive fees that were billed, but on the fundamental dishonesty inherent in the respondent’s client billings themselves,” Justice Lowy wrote. “It is not the sheer number of unworked hours that establishes the misconduct but, rather, the dishonesty manifested by billing for them at all.”

In addition to padding her own hours, Zankowski also faced criticism for adding billable hours for associates who worked for her. She said that time added was for work Zankowski actually did and she simply added it to associates’ time to avoid the effort of creating an entry for herself, and also to discount the work to an associate’s rate. But this order takes a more hardline approach, eviscerating Zankowski’s justification of adding 350 hours to associates’ timesheets noting, “even if the work was done, it was not done by the attorney identified on the bill.” And it goes on:

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“On twelve different dates, if the hours the respondent claimed she worked but attributed to associate attorneys were added to the hours the respondent billed under her own name (which the respondent testified would have been the correct allocation of time), she would have worked more than twenty-four hours,” the order states.

And the order calls out Zankowski’s actions as intentional dishonesty:

“Although the respondent testified that the additional hours reflected her own time spent working on those matters, the hearing committee declined to credit the testimony, finding instead that the clients were intentionally, dishonestly, and excessively billed for the time,” Justice Lowy wrote.

Zankowski’s attorney, Thomas Mullen, said, “All I can say is I am very disappointed with the decision.”

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headshotKathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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