On Behalf of Ford, Kasowitz Brings Civil RICO Case Against Lawyers Whose Bills Claim They Worked up to 57.5 Hours in One Day

Ford Motor Company has filed a civil RICO complaint in the United States District Court, Central District of California, in Los Angeles against a number of California lawyers and law firms, accusing them of violations of the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) in the form of padded and inflated bills for allegedly “unworked” and phantom time that totaled at least tens of millions of dollars incurred by Ford and other automakers.  Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP filed the complaint on behalf of Ford.
 
The case arises out of what has been alleged in the complaint to be a massive and unlawful scheme by numerous law firms, lawyers and other defendants to allegedly exploit and deceive both federal and state courts and the judicial system in California, dupe consumers and their own clients, and to defraud auto makers, including Ford, by falsely and fraudulently inflating their legal fees -- including by falsely submitting to the courts timesheets recording well over 24 hours in a single day -- by tens of millions of dollars over many years.  They allegedly did so by abusing and misusing the fee-shifting aspects of the Song-Beverly Act in California.  Based on the investigation and the allegations in the complaint, as to Ford alone these fraudulent and inflated billings total at least $100 million dollars over 5 years.
 
Among the evidence of allegedly made-up legal bills are fictitious work activities and an unconscionable and impossible number of work hours, including timesheets submitted for payment by the law firms that included claims that individual attorneys had recorded more than 24 hours per day – and in at least one case, up to 57.5 hours in a single workday; timesheets showing lawyers who apparently claimed to be in two different places at the same time – that is:  Who allegedly recorded and billed time for attending two different trials or proceedings in two different courthouses that were geographically distant from each other – that were happening on the exact same day; twenty hour or more workdays spent on clerical tasks for weeks on end while not on trial; over 1,500 vague billing entries for one RICO Defendant that fail to provide even a date for the work that was purportedly performed; and 489 task descriptions in which an attorney billed to “draft a meet confer letter,” and to perform unspecified “legal research.”  There is no plausible reason for why those two tasks – which are utterly distinct -- would be joined and combined with such sustained frequency.  Often these were billed on days that already exceeded over 24 hours of “recorded time.”
 
According to the complaint, the allegedly lead law firm, the Knight Law Group or “KLG,” regularly brought in other law firms and attorneys as co-counsel to handle trial work on purposefully overstaffed cases.  According to the allegations in the complaint, these plaintiff lawyers, often numbering ten to fifteen lawyers for one case or set of plaintiffs, worked in tandem to misrepresent the tasks completed and the amount of time spent on cases.  Then together, they allegedly split the proceeds of the fraudulent awards.
 
According to the allegations in the complaint, the RICO Defendants abused their positions of trust as members of the bar to deceive the courts and Ford, by submitting thousands of fee applications that appeared genuine on their face but which allegedly are clearly false and fraudulent when viewed in context of all other fee applications submitted for work on the same day.   
   
The Kasowitz Benson Torres team representing Ford is led by partners Edward E. McNally, Daniel J. Fetterman and Daniel A. Saunders, and includes partner Fria R. Kermani, counsel David Mark, and associate Matthew S. Manacek.