FEELING THE SQUEEZE 
This is our fourth year tracking attorneys’ billing rates as found in court filings. The result is an exclusive sampling of rates of 269 attorneys at 27 firms in Missouri and elsewhere.
This year, in addition to the 102 Missouri lawyers’ rates, we include the rates of 37 Missouri law firm staffers, and the fees charged by 167 attorneys and 77 staff members from offices and firms in other states who worked on the same cases in 2010 as the Missouri attorneys.
Billing Rates Methodology
The hourly rates were gathered from applications for fees for work completed in 2010 included in court filings.
Fee auditors rare in bankruptcies
Bankruptcy court judges sometimes appoint fee auditors to review hundreds of pages of bills that lawyers, accountants and others submit in bankruptcy cases. But the auditors are appointed only rarely, even as the recession has spurred more bankruptcies.
NAMES IN THE NEWS
The rates of three attorneys whose names have popped up in the news turned up in the research for the Billing Rates issue.
Firms get creative with alternative billing
The recession embedded alternative billing in the legal scene, but law firms continue to hunt, tweak and catalogue arrangements to soothe clients who still are skittish over expenses.
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