A recent BLT Blog story, “D.C. Judge Requests Three Firms’ Rates in Legal Fee Dispute” reports that a judge in Washington said he wants the three law firms that provided pro bono services to the District of Columbia in the landmark gun rights case to open up their books to provide billing data to the court.  Judge Emmet Sullivan of Washington’s federal trial court is trying to determine a fair and reasonable fee for the plaintiffs’ team that represented a group of District residents in the suit in which the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008 overturned the city’s ban on handguns.

Sullivan said in court he’s spent a “great deal” of time reviewing the fee petition and has struggled over assessment of the prevailing market rate for complex civil litigation.  Last year, Sullivan denied without prejudice lead plaintiffs’ lawyer Alan Gura’s of Alexandria, Va.’s Gura & Possessky request to inspect the records.  Sullivan reversed course, saying records, while perhaps not dispositive, will aid his work.

Three law firms – O’Melveny & Myers, Covington & Burling, and Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld – provided pro bono work for the District in the litigation.  Sullivan said he wants to avoid “full-blown litigation” over the three firms’ billing records, and he said he’s not interested in having names attached with the financial data.  The judge also said he is hopeful he will not have to authorize subpoenas to compel Covington, Akin, and O’Melveny to provide the standard billing rates for lawyers who worked on the gun case in the District.