Of all the reasons to kill off the billable hour — and advancing AI technology presents a big one — let us not sleep on the prospect of putting an end to lazy record-keeping. In the heat of lawyerly battle, no one does a particularly great job of tracking all their time. And that’s when lawyers start reconstructing the work in their mind and lose track of details about “deadlines” or “meetings” or “the time-space continuum.”
The city of Broken Hill in New South Wales Australia — a town of around 17,000 — received a 1.5 million Australian dollar settlement (with about 4.6 million Australian dollars in legal fees) in a legal dispute against a builder. Then their lawyer, Sydney-based former Norton Rose and Maddocks partner Keith Redenbach, billed them 10 million Australian dollars for his services, which amounts to around $6.9 million American dollars. Whenever a client gets a bill for 10 times more than they won and more than double the court imposed fee award, they’re going to scrutinize the bill, and that’s when Broken Hill started to notice their lawyer’s invoices resembled more of a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff.
The NSW court concurred with Broken Hill that Redenbach’s billing practices were… broken:
Redenbach, who denied overcharging, billed the council for working 31.12 hours on December 6, 2018 and 25.5 hours on April 18, 2019, the council alleged in a lawsuit filed at the NSW Supreme Court.
The hours he claimed to work on May 8, 9 and 10 were even more impressive—103 hours across the 72-hour period—a feat Justice Elisabeth Peden described as impossible.
Sure, it’s not possible with THAT attitude.
Redenbach has practiced for three decades and presumably understands how time-based billing is supposed to work.
This sort of thing happens every now and again. Back in 2013, an Ohio attorney billed a 29-hour day. But that guy was an amateur for only adding 5 hours to a single day — Redenbach pulled out the Time-Turner some six times.
Redenbach stressed that he didn’t intentionally overbill, suggesting to the court that the discrepancies could be the result of the vagaries of international time zones or his use of a U.S.-based billing system. Though given that the underlying dispute involved a civic centre in a remote mining town roughly 700 miles west of Sydney, it’s hard to imagine Redenbach spent pulling all-nighters on the case while criss-crossing the globe.
Cross-examined about how he could have worked 34.5 hours on September 19, 2019, Redenbach insisted he did work the hours and told the court he remembered that day clearly because he was at home recovering from surgery.
“I was on my sick bed, doing it with boxes being delivered to my home. I know all about it. I remember that time vividly,” he told the court. “It was a difficult time for me, because my dog died, and I couldn’t even—I couldn’t even lift her up to have her euthanized.”
Yeah, not a lot of international jet-setting work from the sick bed. Maybe he was billing in dog years that day as a tribute?
Justice Elisabeth Peden found Redenbach to be a “thoroughly unimpressive witness” who gave “self-serving evidence and even evidence which I consider was false.”
Generally speaking, overbilling like this is a product of bad record-keeping: the work actually happens, but it gets recorded on the wrong day creating an embarrassing impossible day. It’s a reason to invest in better time-tracking products — not necessarily to make the hourly bills better, but to accrue a better internal data for the purpose of setting fair and accurate value-based billing.
Though the court in this case felt the problem went well-beyond lazy records. Redenbach also upped his rates over the course of the engagement, levying a series of “uplift” fees based on the success of the litigation and also adjusted hourly rates upward — all told these success adjustments totaled around 3 million Australian dollars.
Justice Peden found in favor of Broken Hill, awarding A$1.5 million in compensation from Redenbach, A$46,010 in compensation from his firm, and another firm linked to Redenbach had to pay the A$504,698 for misleading the city about its bill.
At this rate he’s not going to have enough money to keep a boat running back and forth over the international date line.
The Billable Hour Enters a Whole New Dimension: Lawyer Billed Client For 34 Hours of Work in a Single Day [Law.com International]
Lawyer billed client more than 30 hours a day in $10m fees dispute [Australian Financial Review]
Earlier: Lawyer Billed 29-Hour Day To The Same Client And Didn’t Expect To Get Caught
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.
The post Lawyer Bills 36-Hour Day As Einstein’s Theories Meet Law Firm Management appeared first on Above the Law.
