Jesus, I'm definately in the wrong job.

[Grumpmeister]

We all knew that solicitors are an overpaid bunch but 9 years worth of man hours for a 5 day court case? I may start studying for a law degree. I'd only need to work 1 week a month going from those figures. 

A High Court judge has blasted a top City of London law firm for charging nine years’ worth of man hours on a five-day trial over BlackBerry patents, in a judgment that will fuel the growing controversy over lawyers’ billing practices.

Lawyers from Allen & Overy racked up nearly £5.2m in costs representing Research in Motion, the maker of the popular BlackBerry device, in a dispute with Visto, a US-based wireless technology company.

“The picture summoned up by this bill of costs is one which is totally unfamiliar to anyone who has been involved in economically conducted patent litigation,” the judge said. In refusing to award Research in Motion its full costs, he said he was bound to prevent a party from recovering “unnecessary and unreasonable’’ expenses.

UK law firms are under pressure to contain the spiralling costs of litigation, as their corporate clients increasingly look to cheaper jurisdictions.

Britain’s reputation as a leading centre for commercial litigation has been tarnished by high-profile cases such as Equitable and BCCI, both of which collapsed after tens of millions of pounds in legal fees.

Rosemary Martin, general counsel of Reuters, said London risked eventually pricing itself out of the litigation market without careful consideration of the seemingly inexorable upward trend of salaries and hourly billing rates.

Thursday’s decision lays bare the extraordinary costs of some disputes in a city where the billing rates of even junior partners can reach £600 per hour.

Two Allen & Overy associates charged more than 4,540 hours on the Research in Motion case over a 15-month period, at a combined cost of nearly £2m. Another £1m was spent on trainees and para-legals tasked with reading background material, according to the judgment.

Research in Motion was seeking to reclaim most of its legal costs from Visto after prevailing on the central issues at stake, by the traditional “loser pays” maxim applying to UK lawsuits.

The dispute is part of a larger, global battle about the validity of Visto’s portfolio of patents relating to wireless e-mail communications, and what Research in Motion claims is a brazen threat effectively to shut down the BlackBerry service.

Allen & Overy said it was instructed to leave “no stone unturned” in defending its client, and its legal costs represented a tiny fraction of the financial risk to Research in Motion’s business posed by the litigation.

Allen & Overy ended up outspending Visto’s lawyers, Taylor Wessing, by a margin of five-to-one on an action that Mr Justice Floyd – himself an intellectual property expert – characterised as “not a particularly heavy” patent case.

High Court judges have raised concerns about escalating costs in a series of recent cases, in what Tim Dutton, chairman of the Bar Council, this year told the Financial Times should be read as a “warning sign” to solicitors about their billing practices.

Company in-house lawyers say big firms are failing to control costs and to embrace modern business practices, despite the dramatic earnings growth they have posted by expanding internationally and by exploiting the corporate takeover boom.