Legal Question in Bankruptcy in California

Re: Legal billing

Thank you for reposting this message with more details - from the initial post I couldn't begin to answer your question. First, billing isn't generally an issue of malpractice, though it can be. It usually boils down to a question of contract between you and the attorney.

To bill for anything where the fees are expected to exceed $1,000, an attorney in California must have a signed retainer agreement. You should have signed a retainer when you filed bankruptcy. Look at that retainer to see if in it you agreed to hourly billing above-and-beyond the initial amount. If not, he probably needed a separate retainer to do all of this "extra" work. It is not appropriate for an attorney to just suddenly "announce" to you that he is going to start billing you for time spent on something that was almost certainly agreed to as a fixed-fee representation. To dispute these new fees, the California State Bar has a program called "Fee Arbitration." Any consumer may demand Fee-Arb from an attorney when there is a dispute over fees being billed. $10,000 above-and-beyond the $3,465.00 he has already charged in a chapter 13 is pretty entertaining - unless your Chapter 13 is extremely complex, and even then he's got to prove you agreed to pay the fees, and that they are reasonable.

Further, there is some direction from the bankruptcy court itself on fees; the bankruptcy courts issue what are referred to as "RARA No-Look" fee limits. In the Central District, the limits are $4,000 for a consumer 13, $4,500 where the debtor is self-employed. These are the maximum an attorney can charge without the Court assuming that the fees are excessive, and therefor requiring the attorney to prove that they are not. It is a rebuttable pressumption, but it gives you an idea of what reasonable fees should be. In the Southern District of California (San Diego, Imperial County, etc...), that RARA fee limit is $3,300 for a consumer 13, $4,000 where the debtor is self employed. As I don't see from your post where you live, I cannot tell you what the limits are in your case, but $13,000+ certainly seems excessive. I would strongly suggest that you send a copy of his demand for $10,000 to the Chapter 13 Trustee and the U.S. Trustee for the district in which you filed along with a letter describing what has transpired - they will probably find this post-filing fee demand VERY interesting.

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