Madoff Trustee's PR Work

Irving Picard, trustee in the Bernard Madoff bankruptcy case, and his law firm (Baker & Hostetler) have filed fee requests in the case totaling approximately $14.7 million for the law firm, and $759,228.75 for Mr. Picard as trustee. There is a very good post on the fee application by Amir Efrati of The Wall Street Journal, on the site of the WSJ law blog (click here).

Of interest to this blog: Of the 1088.50 hours logged by Mr. Picard, 36.7 fall under the category of "Press Inquiries and Responses," for a total of $28,442.50 at Mr. Picard's hourly billing rate of $750. According to the filing, "this section relates to time spent by the Trustee responding to press inquiries, preparing and issuing press releases, and holding press conferences relating to BLMIS [Bernard Madoff Investment Securities], Madoff, customer claims and the recovery of funds."

If my math is correct, this works out to approximately 4% of Mr. Picards time, which is certainly not unreasonable given the high-profile nature of the case. I'm not sure if there was a PR firm working on the effort, but presumably they would also submit a request for fees.

Interestingly, the B&H filing makes no explicit mention of similar activities on the part of other attorneys at the firm, but it is likely they fall under the such activities as "monitoring of third party actions outside of the Bankruptcy Court, both domestically and internationally," or "discussion and conferences regarding litigation strategy," or under general categories of handling customer claims.