Billing Rates 2018- Methodology

The hourly rates were gathered from applications for attorneys’ fees filed with courts within the last 12 months. Rate information from courts generally came from bankruptcy cases, class-action lawsuits and cases in which the winning side requested fees under statutory authority, such as in employment and civil- rights cases. Some rates also came from agreements with public entities for legal advice on specific projects.

In bankruptcy cases, attorneys and firms provided their “usual” rates in fee requests and applications for employment. In class actions, plaintiffs’ attorneys backed up their requests for contingency fees with records of hours worked on the case.

In cases where fees were requested from the losing side, attorneys cited rates they charged that particular client or what they said was a market-value rate for the work.

Attorneys and staff in offices near the metropolitan St. Louis area in Illinois, and the metropolitan Kansas City area in Kansas, were included in the in-state rate charts.

Some caveats:

• Attorneys’ rates might vary according to the client, previously agreed-upon rates and the type of work performed, so one listed rate for an attorney might not apply in other cases.
• The rates are a sampling only, not an all-inclusive listing.
• Though drawn from recent court filings, some fee requests were for work performed in previous years, so rates might have changed in the meantime. Wherever possible, we have used the most recent available rates.
• Attorneys are listed with the firm or organization where they worked at the time the fee request was made. They may since have changed firms.
• Information on titles, practice specialties and office locations comes primarily from firm websites and court records. Practice listings were limited for space and typically describe the type of case for which the fee was incurred, which might not be the attorneys’ main areas of practice.

Reporters Scott Lauck and
Jessica Shumaker and freelance researcher Sarah Lynch researched the listings.