Weil’s Lehman Request: $55 Million for Less Than Five Months of Work (Lehman Bankruptcy)

WSJ Law Blog ^ | Apr 15, 2009 | Ashby Jones

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Lehman Bros. has already set a record as the largest company ever to file for bankruptcy. Now, it’s on course to set a record as the most lucrative for lawyers, especially Harvey Miller and his merry band of lawyers at Weil Gotshal.

In the largest quarterly fee request ever made by lawyers representing a bankrupt debtor, Weil earlier this week asked Robert Peck, a federal bankruptcy judge in New York, to sign off on a $55.1 million payment for its work representing Lehman. . . .

The pace of the work during a bankruptcy is typically most intense during the case’s first several months. Still, UCLA’s Lynn LoPucki, a frequent critic of the bankruptcy process, estimates that Weil stands to bring in more than $200 million in fees by the end of the case — a figure that would dwarf the next-highest fee ever earned by a debtor counsel: the nearly $150 million earned by Weil during the Enron bankruptcy. LoPucki estimates that the total amount of court-approved fees — to lawyers, financial advisers, restructuring consultants and others — could top $900 million in the Lehman case. (Though LoPucki thinks that a $200 million payday might pale in comparison to what a General Motors bankruptcy might yield Weil.) . . . The fee payment request, filed on Monday, serves largely as a tally of all the work lawyers and other staff members at Weil claim to have performed between Sept. 15 and the end of January. The firm says it worked more than 100,000 billable hours during that period. Miller is asking to be paid $950 for each of the nearly 795 hours he worked during the period.

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Just makes you sick.

[GeronL]

$55 million for one quarter?

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Yes.