Attorneys’ fees are fair when the work that is done is appropriate for the task that is demanded. Indeed, the Rules of Professional Conduct require that “A lawyer’s fee shall be reasonable.” Makes sense, right?

In a 110 page opinion, the Delaware Supreme Court affirmed (among other things) an award for attorneys’ fees in excess of $304 million. This apparently amounts to $35,000 per hour according to the Wall Street Journal Law Blog. Good work if you can get it. The ABA Journal further notes that the attorney requesting the payday noted the lower court’s ruminations that:

“There’s an idea that when a lawyer or law firms are going to get a big payment, that there’s something somehow wrong about that, just because it’s a lawyer. I’m sorry, but investment banks have hit it big, a lot of the bigger plaintiffs’ lawyer firms have hit it big. They’ve hit it big many times . . . . And to me, envy is not an appropriate motivation to take into account when you set an attorney fee. It’s not.”

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