Fee audit: what the invoices showed, in both directions
The engagement was to find overbilling. The review found questionable time entries — and also that the firm had billed below the rates its own engagement letter allowed.
A public entity’s counsel asked for a line-by-line review of a law firm’s invoices across a portfolio of matters: whether time or costs were duplicated, whether any day’s hours were implausible, whether the supporting documentation was there, and whether the rates charged matched the engagement letter.
Normalise every line before reading any of it
Each invoice line was reduced to the same ten fields — invoice number and date, matter, case name, charge type, timekeeper, service date, description, quantity, rate, total.
Sort the same data two ways
Once by matter and then by date, to catch the same entry billed twice on one matter. Once by date and then by matter, to catch a timekeeper’s day totalling more than a day can hold.
Separate what is certain from what is questionable
Duplicate entries are a matter of fact. A pattern that looks like padding is not, and it is reported as a pattern with the examples attached.
Check the rates in both directions
The engagement letter is the benchmark, and a variance is reported whether it runs against the client or in the client’s favour.
What the day-sorted view found
One timekeeper billed 13.1 hours on one day and 12.5 the next. On a third day an individual billed 56.0 hours — fourteen separate matters at four hours each — for collecting and organising vendor invoices.
On another day, one attorney charged seventeen different matters with the same two narrative entries, word for word. Over a later three-day stretch, fifteen one-hour entries appeared for drafting final invoices, several on matters that carried only four or five time entries in total. Whether that work was performed cannot be established from an invoice. That it is a recognisable way to generate billable hours can be said, and was.
Two cost entries had no supporting documentation attached, and both are identified by invoice and amount.
What we do not do
We do not report only the findings that favour the party paying for the review. The engagement letter permitted higher hourly rates for principals, associates and paralegals than the firm actually charged. In most instances it billed below what it was entitled to, in all three grades. That is in the report.
We also do not convert an inference into a conclusion. On duplication the report finds none — on any matter, across any pair of invoice dates. On the excessive entries it says what it can, that the work cannot be verified from the invoice and that the pattern is questionable, and no more.
A review that reported the variance in both directions
Sorting the same line items by calendar day as well as by matter — which is the only view in which a 56-hour day, spread across fourteen matters, becomes visible.```````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````
Parties, jurisdictions and identifying facts are altered or withheld. Methods, data volumes and outcomes are not.
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