Padding hours is bad. No one is arguing that. But there are always gray areas where a 10-minute phone call can be rounded up or down. Or where a substantive epiphany hits during a commute. The point is there’s some acceptable leeway in the billing process and we rely on attorneys as professionals to ethically navigate those questionable waters.
That said, wherever that line is, billing over 2000 hours to a non-existent case would be over it.
The Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission[1]
published its complaint against John Paul Paleczny, formerly of Lewis Brisbois. Lewis Brisbois has since fired Paleczny for the reasons detailed in the complaint, yet for some reason still has his bio up on their website (here’s the screenshot if and when the firm gets around to deleting it). That seems like a substantial oversight! And yet, the further we dig into the details, this will seem entirely predictable.
It all began with a pro bono matter representing an inmate in a civil rights suit. After the judge dismissed the inmate’s claims, the partner on the matter wrote the plaintiff informing him that the firm’s representation had ended.
This was January 3, 2020.
At that point, well…
13. Between January 3, 2020 and December 23, 2020, Respondent recorded 2,061.4 hours to the Robinson matter, even though the matter had been closed and LBBS’s representation of Robinson had ended. Respondent knew by at least January 21, 2020, the lapse of the 28-day period to appeal, that the firm would not be appealing the adverse ruling on behalf of Mr. Robinson. In records created to account for the time he purportedly spent on the matter in 2020, Respondent described the work he did as drafting, editing, and amending a motion for summary judgment. For each day that Respondent claimed that he worked on the Robinson matter, he entered a description of his purported legal services and the time that he claimed he spent, with each entry specific to the tenth of an hour. Any time that Respondent spent on the summary judgment motion prior to January 21, 2020 served no purpose because the case had been dismissed and no appeal had been filed. All of the entries for January 21, 2020 and later were false because Respondent had not worked on the Robinson matter since at least January 21, 2020. Respondent knew each time he recorded time to the Robinson matter between January 21, 2020 and December 23, 2020 that his time entry was false.
That’s 2061.4 hours. For some reason, the point-4 is the funniest part to me.
Obviously the attorney is going to get the lion’s share of the blame here, but can we take a second to wonder what the hell the firm was doing this whole time? They were getting his timesheets, which for a year continued to show time entries in which he “described the work he did as drafting, editing, and amending a motion for summary judgment” even though the firm had ended the representation. Is there a billing department? Is there a partner reviewing non-billed time? Who was supervising this? Is there an assignments committee keeping track of what associates are doing? How did this go on for more than a month, let alone a year.
Scratch that, more than a year. Because for the first five and a half weeks of 2021, he recorded 245.80 hours to the summary judgment motion. That means he was on track for a 2000-hour year in 2021 too. Putting aside that the matter was closed, what kind of summary judgment motion did the firm think he was drafting for over a year?
While dishonest, at least billing time to a pro bono matter isn’t defrauding any clients. Though it would have a tangible impact if the firm keys its bonuses to hours billed.
Guess what Lewis Brisbois does?!
14. In 2020, LBBS awarded quarterly bonuses to associates who met an annual “billable hours” requirement. For each quarter in 2020, Respondent falsely billed enough hours to the Robinson matter to demonstrate that he would achieve the annual billable hours requirement. Based on these false representations, LBBS paid Respondent a bonus each quarter totaling $12,000 for the year.
Associates who haven’t had their passion for helping the downtrodden systematically crushed by the firm yet always complain when firms cap the amount of hours that count toward bonuses at 100 or 200. It is a wretched policy that penalizes attorneys trying to fulfill their professional obligations. But this right here is why we can’t have nice things.
In one last instance of truly astounding grit and determination, the complaint says that two partners and an administrator confronted him over the status of the case in February and he went ahead and told them he’d been working on the summary judgment motion. That’s epic levels of chutzpah.
Lest this story get better for the attorney:
21. After Respondent’s termination from LBBS, he began to seek other employment. Respondent interviewed with at least four Chicago law firms. In the course of the interview process, each of those law firms asked Respondent about the circumstances surrounding his departure from LBBS. Each time, Respondent told the law firm with which he was interviewing that LBBS had laid him off because LBBS did not have enough work to support his continued employment.
22. Respondent’s statements to the law firms that he interviewed with were false because Respondent had not been laid off because LBBS had insufficient work to support his continued employment. Rather, Respondent had been terminated on February 11, 2021 by LBBS for the misconduct described in Count I, above.
In his defense, it’s a deceit that would be pretty easy to pull off when the old firm still hasn’t removed his profile. Frankly, he was being generous by admitting that he’d left Lewis Brisbois at all — he could’ve plausibly presented himself as still working there and linked to his bio and no one would’ve been the wiser.
In any event, this is a truly remarkable fact pattern, and one that should encourage Lewis Brisbois to do some serious rethinking of its protocols. Because it’s hard to deal with dishonesty, but dishonesty on the level of these allegations should be impossible to slip past the goalie.
[1] Do we have to put in a parenthetical before we start calling it IARDC? Wait, SCOTUS has even stopped doing that? Amazing!
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 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.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).
