A recent Washington Post story, “High-Priced Lawyer Sues Former Client, Then Agrees to Pay Him $102,000” reports that Glenn C. Lewis lost his fee dispute battle with a former client in the Fairfax County courthouse on Friday.  Lewis, a divorce lawyer and the former president of the Virginia Bar Association boasts that he is the most expensive lawyer in the D.C. area, charging $850 an hour.  Lewis sued one of his former clients for an additional $500,000 in attorney fees and interest, although he’d already been paid $378,000.  The former client, Steve Firestone, a lawyer himself, countersued for legal malpractice and hired another former state bar president, Bernard J. DiMuro, as an expert witness.

Lewis’s total legal bill for the Firestone divorce was $627,000.  DiMuro found that not only were Lewis’s legal bills “flagrantly disproportionate to the value of the dispute,” but Lewis’s settlement was a lousy deal.  DiMuro noted that three lawyers from Lewis’s firm worked on Firestone’s case, and two lawyers often appeared at meetings or depositions that would normally be handled by one lawyer.  Di Muro called this “a garden-variety divorce.”  In pretrial discovery, DiMuro obtained billing records for all of Lewis’s cases, not just the Firestone case.  He found examples of days where Lewis billed for 39 hours; 31 hours; 40 hours; 71 hours.  In a 16-month period in 2003 and 2004, DiMuro calculated in court records, Lewis billed his clients for 3,620 hours, or 7.4 hours per day, 365 days per year.

Lewis’s lawyers angered Fairfax judges by failing to respond to basic requests and orders.  Lewis even failed to show up for his own deposition.  Lewis finally agreed to pay his former client more than $102,000, including $25,000 in sanctions.

By the way, Firestone’s ex-wife used Fairfax lawyer David L. Duff for the divorce.  Duff’s total legal bill for the divorce: $73,000.