| |
Welcome to The Devil's Advocate
Established in 1993, The Devil's Advocate is
the leading authority on legal fees and legal fee management. Our clients include major corporations,
government agencies, law firms, insurance companies, and anyone else who pays substantial
legal fees, needs to examine the reasonableness of fees,
or wishes to analyze litigation issues. (To respect the
confidentiality of our clients, we do not advertise names of our many clients,
which include a substantial percentage of the Fortune 500, for example.) We have reviewed
most of the firms in the annual lists of large law firms published by the legal
press, plus hundreds of other firms. And we've been hired by many such
firms, too.
We are
nationally-recognized for our legal fee management and
litigation consulting expertise,
including legal bill reviews (or "legal bill audits") and expert testimony.
Our engagements include supporting or challenging legal bills on behalf
of lawyers, clients, and where fee-shifting and fee petitions (e.g.,
class actions and bankruptcies) are involved. We have examined over $1 billion in legal fees from over a thousand law firms, in
hundreds of engagements. But we do much more than just review bills, from
selecting the right lawyer, negotiating a fair fee agreement, monitoring staff
and performance, establishing and tracking budgets and estimates, reviewing work product,
tactics, and strategy, and resolving fee and other disputes.
Everyone is welcome to browse our site
for helpful information. See Important Notices
for the website terms of use. We also have links on this website to other
resources.
Link to our site to help
others find us: Devil's Advocate | Legal
Fee Management
Get
Your Fresh CLE Here |
|
Devil's Advocate provides continuing
legal education (CLE) and in-house training on legal fee issues,
litigation management, and other topics.
Current topics include:
- Fee-Shifting: Supporting and
Challenging Fee Petitions
- Client Fee Disputes:
Charging Reasonable Fees
- Octane Fitness: The Supreme
Court opens the floodgates for patent
fee-shifting
Visit our Legal
Education page for details |
|
|
We wrote the
book on legal fees
The
authoritative text on legal fees & how to manage
them is ... |
|
Our Free Legal
Fees Pamphlet
An organized, detailed summary of
legal fees issues ... |
 |
Legal Fees: Law & Management
by John Toothman & Prof. William G. Ross
The authoritative and most influential book about legal fees
and managing lawyers.
More information |
|
 |
|
Reasonable Legal Fees 2d
Our pamphlet on reasonable fees, from the perspective of lawyers and
clients: To Get Paid, Get Reasonable
Extensive
discussion of the general legal basis for reasonable legal fees and expenses and how
those issues are handled in common litigation and ethical situations.
Also describes common legal bill review ("audit") issues.
The second edition is now available for free in "pdf" electronic format.
Use this link to e-mail us your request:
 |
|
|
|
|
|
Two Books for Clients &
Lawyers from The Civilian's Guide to Lawyers
|
 |
The Civilian's Guide to Lawyers™:
How to Hire a Lawyer ($9.90; 44,000
words)
Amazon Kindle Edition
Barnes & Noble ePub Edition |
|
 |
The Client's Bill of Rights: Based on our original Client Bill
of Rights™. Includes the ten rights all clients have
and all lawyers should respect. ($2.99; 7,700 words)
Amazon Kindle Edition
Barnes & Noble ePub Edition |
|
Our Legal
Fee Management & Litigation Consulting Services
Devil's Advocate brings the perspective of experienced trial lawyers to
legal fee analysis and litigation management.
Our services include:
Litigation Evaluation |
Evaluate litigation options, including cost-benefit
analysis of potential litigation. Assess case risk and settlement
value. Analyze potential legal fee disputes and legal malpractice
claims. |
Independent Counsel |
Assist clients who do not have in-house counsel by
providing an in-house, independent perspective and litigation
management consulting services. |
Lawyer Selection |
Help clients to select qualified, cost-effective, and
experienced counsel (or replacement counsel) to fit any engagement. |
Fee Agreements |
Draft "client-friendly" fee agreements for hourly,
contingent, hybrid, and other alternative fee engagements to avoid
many of the lopsided terms some firms use. Evaluate the effectiveness
of alternative fees. |
Estimating Fees |
Establish matter plans and itemized budgets or
estimates. Analyze potential fee and hourly rate benchmarks and
conduct fee surveys. Evaluate and improve fee estimating process.
Reconcile budgets/estimates against actual bills. |
Litigation Monitoring |
Monitor law firm performance (and usually bills) as
litigation progresses, looking for problems with performance and fees,
as well as tactical and strategic options, including settlement. |
Litigation Tactical Support |
Beyond case evaluation and monitoring, provide advanced
strategy and tactics consulting for pre-trial and trial. Act as
"Devil’s Advocate" in moot court for arguments and trial prep, assist
with advanced witness preparation, conduct opposition research and
emulation for role-playing in prep. |
Second Opinions |
Analyze significant litigation issues to provide
clients or law firms with independent second opinions on options and
cost-benefit concerns. |
Legal Bill Reviews |
Independent forensic or management review of legal
fees, rates, expenses, and work product, often as a basis for expert
testimony. This may include review of bills in realtime (as bills are
issued to monitor performance and cost) as well as in the event of fee
disputes and fee-shifting petitions. Includes reviews challenging or
supporting the reasonableness of fees and expenses, as well as quality
of performance. Bill reviews are a basic tool that is part of legal
fee management, post mortems, malpractice and ethics reviews, and
other DA services. Bill reviews are sometimes referred to as legal fee
audits. |
Expert Testimony |
Expert testimony presenting the results of any DA
analysis or review, including legal bill reviews, ethical issues, and
legal malpractice. |
Legal Fee Examiner |
Neutral, independent legal bill reviews and analysis
of related issues as court-appointed expert, mediator, arbitrator,
special master, receiver, or the like. |
Litigation Post Mortems |
Analyze litigation performance and fees after the
fact, including fees, either for management purposes or to evaluate
potential ethics, fee, or malpractice issues. |
We're uniquely qualified:
Devil's Advocate and its unique services have been featured in stories by
The
Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bottomline, CBS Radio's Marketplace, Inc. Magazine, The
Business News Network, Entrepreneur magazine, The New Jersey Law Journal,
New York Post, New York Law Journal, Legal Times, Nation's Business, American
Lawyer, California Lawyer, Miami Herald, Virginia Business
Magazine, Of Counsel, D&B Report, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and many
more publications.
For clients without in-house legal counsel, we provide our Independent Counsel
service to fill the legal management gap at a reasonable cost.
We strive to provide cost-effective services while promoting an equitable
lawyer-client relationship.
We are independent. We do not prejudge any legal bill
or law firm. We are not owned
by nor are we affiliated with any other entity, such
as an insurance company or law firm.
Our legal fee reviews and audits are based on
established,
legal, not arbitrary, standards.
We track ethical rules and maintain the confidentiality of our
work as allowed by law.
We provide continuing legal
education (CLE) and training courses for lawyers, law firms, in-house legal
departments, and anyone else dealing with the legal system, lawyers and
fees.
We use proprietary methods and
software to automate and expedite review, but we dig deep with a
line-by-line analysis.
The fees we charge for our services are the most
reasonable and cost-effective in the country.
Our services are provided nationwide.
We also work with international clients, especially those dealing with US
law firms or legal fee issues.
Devil's Advocate is also
known as TLF Consulting, our more bland name.
DA has been registered as a federal
contractor through the GSA Central Contractor Registry.
Since The Devil's Advocate was founded in 1993, we have been the pre-eminent national authority on legal fee management. We have also
pioneered litigation consulting to monitor lawyer performance as well as cost.
Browse our web-site for more information about our
services, our experience, and samples of our work. We've included
articles by and about us. You'll also find valuable monographs we have prepared,
including the Client Bill of Rights, Managing Lawyers and Legal Fees, and our
Client-Friendly Billing Agreement.
|
|
| |
 Welcome:
Who We Are:
What We Do:
Free (or Cheap) Help:
Articles & Publications:
Presentations:
Last update:
01/07/15
Established 1993
Our 22nd Year
|
|