Chicago Paid Lawyers Billing 69 Hours In One Day

There are 24 hours in a day. Unless it happens to be one of the rare days when the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service applies an intercalary second, in which case there are 24 hours and one second in a day. But in no event is a day 69 hours long, though you wouldn’t know that based on Chicago’s legal bills.

The Chicago Tribune’s Joe Mahr and Jason Meisner embarked on a deep dive into legal invoices paid by the city of Chicago to its stable of private law firms — specifically those handling federal civil rights cases defending the city from people who had their lives stolen by Chicago police misconduct. In its report, the Tribune found at least 40 instances where a firm billed for a timekeeper working more than 24 hours in a single day, all of which were dutifully paid in full.

One bill logged 69 hours for a single attorney over a 24-hour stretch. A different firm had one person clocking 24+ hours on 15 separate occasions.

Unless the Chicago Pope wants to rewrite the Gregorian calendar, that’s going to be a problem.

“Doesn’t the city have some sort of computer system to guard against paying bills like these?” you might ask. And you’d be on to something! Because the city of Chicago does indeed use CounselLink, for the express purpose of flagging this kind of thing. Outside counsel must submit invoices electronically, and the software identifies invoices where a timekeeper logs more than 10 hours in a day to give the bureaucracy at opportunity to give the bills a second look.

And the software worked… the humans did not.

In the last decade, roughly 1,500 invoices got flagged by this 10-hour heuristic. The city reduced payment on 139 of them, and the remaining 90 percent or so got paid to the penny. And, of course, 10 hours is a conservative figure, especially for attorneys going to trial One invoice featured 162 separate instances of a staffer billing 10+ hours in a day during a trial month, which is a lot but within the realm of reasonable depending on the demands of the trial.

But the 10-hour flag is just the first step. The problem is that the city wasn’t taking the second step of scrutinizing the TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR flag. Which is, when you think about it, the more important one.

All ethically compliant bills are alike; each 24+ hour bill is comical in its own way. Just two weeks ago, an Australian court punished a lawyer for billing Broken Hill more than 30 hours in multiple single days. That lawyer defended himself citing dead dogs and international time zones. Back in 2013, an Ohio attorney who billed a 29-hour day to the taxpayer-funded indigent defense system blamed record-keeping. A Biglaw partner had her license suspended for (among other things) entries where she billed for depositions she didn’t attend. A Dentons associate got caught billing 277 hours on a document review project for 20 documents that nobody had opened.

More than half the overbilling episodes caught by the Tribune were attributable to Borkan & Scahill. For its part, the firm said those clock-busting bills arose from multiple employees billing their time under a single timekeeper.

“Because of varying needs throughout the year, we do not input a dozen or more separate timekeeper codes for every single paralegal we use on every single file,” the statement said. “Rather, we use the general timekeeper codes of our head paralegals to document these services on invoices.”

That is… not best practice. And the city agrees, with its outside counsel guidelines explicitly requiring invoices to list “the Name or Timekeeper ID of the person(s) who performed the work billed.” Chicago even updated the guidelines in March to specifically prohibit “‘sharing’ timekeeper accounts to bill multiple staff under one staff member’s account.”

While “hey, each person should probably bill their own time” should be a simple rule to follow, the city doubtless imposes a byzantine set of guidelines upon outside counsel that incentivizes the sort of corner-cutting involved here. If it’s going to take hours out of substantive work to get a second timekeeper approved… that’s when firms will say “just slap that time under the pre-approved code.” It’s not good, but it’s what happens when clients make life difficult. Everyone will point fingers over this reporting — because finger-pointing is fun — but they probably should all sit down together and hash out a better, more streamlined billing procedure that prevents these mistakes from ever coming up.

Or just commit to handling this work entirely in-house. One of the great scams of the ironically named “fiscal conservatism” movement that’s held sway in this country for almost 50 years is the idea that government work gets cheaper when it’s farmed out to the private sector and we’re half a century into “nope, apparently not!” Even if one assumes the private sector performs more efficiently — a questionable prospect — those efficiency gains would have to be more than what the firm needs to take in profit to succeed as a business. Chicago’s reversed-conviction cases, per the Tribune, cost taxpayers more per case than New York or L.A.

Well, Chicago has a solution to this overbilling problem!

Last fall, the law department began what it described as a pilot project for “new billing protocols and additional layers of review by introducing a third-party managed bill review service to improve invoice compliance.”

They hired another private contractor.

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.