Attorneys Fees

Outside of Trumpworld, fee awards are extremely rare in almost every practice area.

This is deliciously nerdy -- and we love it!

The juicier stuff often lies in the analysis of the fees charged by the winning side’s lawyers.

Local elections matter.

Data analytics can help attorneys win new clients and make these clients profitable ones.

* Green Party presidential nominee Dr. Jill Stein will appear at Vermont Law School today, where she’ll meet with members of the law school community to speak about her plan to transition the country using 100 percent renewable energy. Law students will be especially excited to hear about her plans to cancel all student loan debt. [VTDigger]

* “Talk to your classmates, especially those with different views. Even if you come away from it disagreeing even more, at least you know what makes them tick, which is a useful thing.” Last week, Justice Elena Kagan went back to Harvard Law, the school where she once served as dean, to share helpful tips with law students. [Harvard Crimson]

* Federal prosecutors may have dropped their corruption case against ex-Gov. Bob McDonnell after SCOTUS threw out his convictions, but now he’s got some pretty hefty legal bills to pay to Jones Day and Holland & Knight. Right now, he owes more than $10M to the partners who helped clear his name. [Richmond Times-Dispatch]

* A lot of big-time lateral moves were announced yesterday, including Kirkland & Ellis’s mass hiring of all Bancroft lawyers, but Gibson Dunn’s news may top all the rest we’ve yet to cover. Stuart Delery, the former acting associate attorney general of the Justice Department, will join the firm as a partner in Washington, D.C. [Big Law Business]

* Ex-Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper has found a new home — or rather, a “strategic affiliation” — with a global Biglaw firm. He’ll be working out of the Calgary office of Dentons, where he’ll work with many former colleagues and advise firm clients on market access, managing global geopolitical, and economic risk. [Huffington Post]

As Gawker enters the dustbin of history, people still don't seem to understand Peter Thiel's strategy.

* Happy Friday! Let’s start by giving props to the firms that announced pay raises yesterday: Morgan Lewis, Andrews Kurth, Ashurst, Crowell & Moring, Orrick, and Dechert. [Above the Law / 2016 Salary Increase]

* Speaking of the Great Pay Raise of 2016, law firm leaders want to reassure irate in-house counsel: don’t worry, you won’t see this (directly) reflected in your rates. [Big Law Business]

* Biglaw Game of Thrones: who are the leading contenders to succeed Jeffrey Stone and Peter Sacripanti as co-chairs of McDermott? [American Lawyer]

* The Second Circuit plays a sad song for record companies in a closely watched copyright case. [How Appealing]

* And in other copyright news, SCOTUS (sorta) clarifies the standards for awarding attorneys’ fees in copyright cases. [New York Times]

* Look for indictments to issue from the grand jury in the Dan Markel murder case. [News4Jax]

* Noam Scheiber of the Times takes a close look at struggling Valparaiso Law — and it’s not a pretty picture. (Expect more on this later.) [New York Times]

* Ex-prosecutor gone bad: a Cleveland criminal defense attorney just got convicted after agreeing to launder thousands of dollars for someone he thought was a cocaine dealer. [Cleveland Plain Dealer]

* “Congress is the only source for such an appropriation, and no public money can be spent without one.” The House was successful in its suit over the improper funding of an Obamacare subsidy program, but this victory may serve as a setback to those who have come to rely upon it. You can expect the Obama administration to appeal. [POLITICO]

* The Ninth Circuit will allow attorneys who secured a victory in the Stetson BARBRI antitrust case to get a second chance to score the nearly $2M in attorneys fees they originally requested before Judge Manuel Real shot them down. Due to his prior “erroneous findings and conclusions,” the Ninth Circuit has essentially removed Judge Real from the case. [Courthouse News Service]

* “People are turned off on legal education because of a lack of suitable paying jobs.” Even while facing a dearth of applicants, Minnesota Law has decided to scale back on the size of its first-year class — taking in less of the tuition income that it needs to survive — in order to preserve its standing as a top law school. [DealBook / New York Times]

* Former partners of the dearly departed Dickstein Shapiro will no longer have to worry about that $8.4 million sublease lawsuit filed by Sullivan & Worcester after they left the firm’s New York office to lateral en masse to Blank Rome. Both sides have amicably resolved their dispute, but we wonder how much it cost to do so. [Big Law Business]

* A grand jury has upgraded the charges against Ryan Petersen, the man alleged to have shot 23-year-old law firm clerk Chase Passauer to death in his office chair. Peterson had been charged with second-degree murder in Passauer’s death, but now faces a charge of premeditated first-degree murder for the commission of the crime. [Star Tribune]

When it comes to attorneys' fees for Biglaw partners, no number is ever too high.

A six-figure sum, but nothing close to her $1.4 million request.

* With fewer and fewer students applying to law school, acceptance rates have skyrocketed. Some, like GW Law, have even been accused of “laundering [their] credentials” by padding their enrollment numbers with transfers. [GW Hatchet]

* “People don’t graduate from law school understanding the business of law.” That’s just one of the reasons recent grads are having such a tough time getting jobs as associates. Suffolk Law thinks it can help change that. [Boston Business Journal]

* “This is an example of the system working as intended”: Hundreds of thousands of dollars are due to successful plaintiffs in same-sex marriage cases, and millions of dollars in attorneys’ fees for that work is racking up interest. [National Law Journal]

* James Risen, the New York Times reporter who refused to out his source as part of a CIA investigation, has won the right to keep his journalistic integrity intact after a long legal battle. Prosecutors have officially dropped him as a witness. [Bloomberg]

* After much talk about partners heading for the exits before, during, and after the Patton Boggs and Squire Sanders merger, and Bob Luskin has finally left the building for Paul Hastings. We hope his parting wasn’t “painful” for him. [WSJ Law Blog]

The California Court of Appeal recently provided rare guidance regarding a third party’s obligations to produce electronically stored information (ESI) in response to a subpoena. In Vasquez v. California School of Culinary Arts, Inc. (Sallie Mae) (August 27, 2014, B250600) Cal.App.4th (2014 WL 4793703), the court defined subpoenaed parties’ obligations to extract existing data from computer systems and upheld an award of attorneys’ fees against the recalcitrant third party. The court concluded that it is unreasonable for a third party to withhold ESI that exists in its computer systems on the basis that outputting the ESI entails creating a “new” spreadsheet.

In this age social media justice, sooner or later you’re going to have an encounter with a negative online review, whether your a business owner, or simply a consumer. It seems like it’s becoming an accepted aspect of our lives. Increasingly, however, consumer reviews posted on various Internet sites are becoming the subject of litigation.

* Attorney General Eric Holder has until tomorrow to decide whether the government will seek the death penalty in the case against Dzhokhar Tsaernaev. Screw his fan clubs, he deserves it. [Associated Press]

* “Those who know me know I don’t like to lose.” Good thing he didn’t. Leo Strine was unanimously confirmed as Chief Justice of Delaware’s Supreme Court. We can’t wait to see what he’ll bring to his new bench. [Reuters]

* “[N]ominal relief does not necessarily a nominal victory make.” Any day that a lawyer can secure a $1 award for his client and a $34,772 award of fees for himself is a very successful day as a lawyer. [New York Law Journal]

* The mayor of Hoboken, New Jersey, was sued, and she’s blaming Chris Christie and his allies for the whole thing. When the governor found out, he had just finished bringing about world peace. [Star-Ledger]

* Kansas Law will offer in-state tuition to people near Kansas City, Missouri. It must be hurting to fill its seats to make such an offer just because the city name has Kansas in it. [Kansas City Business Journal]

* George Zimmerman’s estranged wife, Shellie, is well on her way to getting a default judgment of divorce. She may be down one dog in her life, but she still wants custody of their two pets. [Orlando Sentinel]

Next time your relatives ask for help with a landlord/tenant matter, ask them if they're willing to pay you six figures for your assistance.

* Victoria Espinel, chief IP counsel to the White House (better known as the “copyright czar”), has stepped down. A tech or trade company will snap her up in 3… 2… [Corporate Counsel]

* Child custody train wreck alert: Baby Veronica of SCOTUS fame was in the news after her father was arrested for refusing to return his child to her adoptive parents. [ABC News]

* Rather than watching people pump gas, BP is watching people pump out lawsuits against the company at a rather alarming rate as a result of its 2010 oil spill. [Businessweek]

* Cynthia Brim, the Illinois judge who was reelected despite the fact that she was legally insane, finally had a complaint filed against her by the state’s judicial board for being just a little bit too kooky for court. [Chicago Tribune]

* Your degree might not be worth a million dollars, but if you went to one of these schools, you probably got a good bank for your buck. We’ll have more on this later. [The Short List / U.S. News & World Report]

* The fight over attorneys’ fees in the antitrust lawsuits filed against BARBRI continues rage on, and class members still haven’t received a penny — which is all they’d really get, anyway. [National Law Journal]

* Congratulations to Newark Mayor and Yale Law alumnus Cory Booker! Last night, he handily won the New Jersey Democratic primary election for the late U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg’s seat. [CBS News]

Desperation breeds heavy discounting. How bad has it gotten?

You will not believe the markup on the billable rates for contract attorneys these days.

* To those of you who celebrate it, Happy Easter! Welcome the holiday by voting in the ABA Journal’s fifth annual “Peeps in Law” contest. [ABA Journal] * If law firm brackets aren’t your thing, check out Professor Kyle Graham’s brackets for (1) law school classes and (2) law blogs. I’m thankful for ATL’s #1 seed but terrified by who we’re up against (because they’ve ripped me a new one before). [noncuratlex] * Sorry, Judge Steiner, you wuz robbed; you should have been our Judge of the Day. It’s tough to top “allegations of a sexual quid pro quo with a female lawyer and the eye-opening confiscation of carpet from [chambers] for forensic analysis.” [OC Weekly] William Shatner * “William Shatner’s Seductive Powers Don’t Create a Fiduciary Duty.” Robyn Hagan Cain explains why. [U.S. Second Circuit / FindLaw] * Citi settles securities cases for $730 million. Matt Levine is not impressed. [Dealbreaker] * And Ted Frank is incensed by Bernstein Litowitz’s nine-figure fee request. [Point of Law] * If you’re already depressed by public ignorance about the Supreme Court, don’t look at the responses to question 9 of this opinion poll. [Penn Schoen Berland] * Steven Harper — author of a new (and very good) book about the legal profession, The Lawyer Bubble (affiliate link) — offers thoughts on the billable hour in the wake of the DLA Piper overbilling allegations. [New York Times]