Weil Poised to Pass $100 Million Mark in Lehman Bankruptcy Fees
Tuesday, 18 August 2009 21:01   
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Law Firm Bulletin - Large Law Firm News

Weil, Gotshal & Manges filed its second application for legal fees and expenses late Monday, and, if approved, the firm will have crossed the $100 million mark in total billings if one includes so-called hold back payments the court will distribute at a later date.

The second application covers four months -- Feb. 1 through May 31 -- and it comes just a few days after Judge James Peck of federal bankruptcy court in Manhattan approved Weil's initial request for about $55 million in fees and expenses for the period of Sept. 15, 2008 through January of this year. As the Wall Street Journal reported Monday, that application got the approval of not only Peck, but also a special fee committee headed up by Kenneth Feinberg (the Obama administration's pay czar).

The newest application (which you can download here) says Weil lawyers billed more than 86,000 hours over those four months, which breaks down roughly to 700 or so hours per day, seven days a week. The request -- which includes $45,227,832.25 in fees and $1.2 million in expenses -- amounts to about $375,000 per day over those four months -- about the same level Weil billed in the first four-plus months of the Chapter 11 case. One way to look at that number is to say that Weil is churning out about $15,500 worth of legal work every 24 hours.

The firm is unwinding tens of thousands of derivatives contracts, trying to track down borrowers who owe Lehman and
working on more than a dozen transactions in which Lehman will unload (or has already unloaded) some of its most-prized assets in order to raise cash. In all,

Weil lawyers helped recover about $3 billion in cash for Lehman's estate between February and May, the filing says.

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