Welcome to Billing Rates 2019

This year’s edition features an expansive set of data. We found rates for 213 Missouri-based attorneys and 77 Missouri staff members. We also feature rates for numerous lawyers and staff who work at out-of-state offices of Missouri or metro-area firms.

A large portion of that data is thanks to a massive class-action settlement with Syngenta regarding its use of genetically modified corn. A federal judge gave final approval late last year to a $1.51 billion class-wide settlement — the largest Missouri case of 2018 as tracked by Missouri Lawyers Media.

A third of that settlement went to fees for hundreds of lawyers across the country who aided in the litigation. The filings in support of that fee application also reveal the biggest hourly fees in this year’s Billing Rates edition — $865 an hour for the partners at Stueve Siegel Hanson and Gray, Ritter & Graham who led the case.

The median hourly rate for Missouri lawyers as a whole was $370 an hour, up from the $318 median rate we reported in 2018. Outside of the state’s two metropolitan areas, the median remained at $250.

In Kansas City, the median rate was $405 an hour, up from $350 the prior year.  The median partner charged $475 an hour, while the median associate rate was $345. In St. Louis, the median rate was $343, with the median partner charging $390 and the median associate charging $298. St. Louis figures were calculated from a pool of 96 attorneys, while the Kansas City figures were from a pool of 178 lawyers.

Missouri Lawyers Media gathers hourly rates from fee applications filed with courts within the past 12 months. Rate information from courts generally came from bankruptcy cases, class-action lawsuits and cases in which the prevailing side was able to request its legal costs under a fee-shifting statute, such as in employment and civil-rights cases. Some rates also came from agreements with public entities for legal advice on specific projects.

Where possible, we use the attorney’s standard or customary rates, rather than the rate the court applied or discounted rates offered to a particular client. Rates can vary according to the case or client, so one listed rate for an attorney might not apply in other cases.

The rates are a sampling only. 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 might have changed firms or been promoted since then, or the firm might have changed names or ceased to exist.

Information on titles, practice specialties and office locations comes primarily from fee applications, supplemented with information from firm websites. Practice listings typically describe the type of case for which the fee was incurred, which might not be the attorney’s main area of practice.

Attorneys and staff in offices near the metropolitan St. Louis area in Illinois and the metropolitan Kansas City area in Kansas were counted as in-state rates. If it was not clear where staff members were located, we generally list them as being in the location of the firm’s headquarters.

Reporters Scott Lauck, Jessica Shumaker and Nicholas Phillips, and freelance researcher Jennie Goodman researched the listings.