Ottawa says lawyers don't deserve $80 million for First Nation child welfare settlement
Ottawa says lawyers don't deserve $80 million for First Nation child welfare settlement
The legal bill will not be paid out from the $23 billion in federal cash set aside for compensation. It also won't come from the other $20 billion earmarked by Ottawa for long-term reform of First Nations child and family services. Class action lawyers will be paid through additional public funds.
Their bill is $80 million dollars for a case taken on by multiple firms for over 10 years. It’s 0.19% of the total settlement amount, and doesn’t come out of the settlement money. Sounds fair to me.
$80 million. Eighty.
Even if there were 10 firms, that’s nearly $1 million ($800k) for the work, annually. And that sounds “fair” to you?!?
This sounds like typical billing when you know they have endless money.
These law firms generated $23,000,000,000 in value for their client and are asking for $80,000,000 in compensation. That is a paltry amount of compensation compared to the value they generated. It's also in line with every other law firm which typically take 0.5% - 1% of the value they generate in cases over $1billion. If these law firms didn't get involved, their clients would be getting $0. Their work was worth it.
I'm curious how many man hours were put into this case.
The Federal government has an obligation to negotiate or otherwise try to reduce this bill. It's public funds, and. I dont think they should just take the lawyers word for it in what they are able to bill.
Don't want to pay a purchasing lawyers bill? Don't get sued.
Sure, but this just isn't true. It's normal in Canada for a losing party to dispute the opposition councils bill on the grounds of hourly rates, disbursements and time spent. In some provinces the dispute is handled by a regulatory body, or you can go back to court to figure it out.
The dispute isn't about not paying, it's about ensuring that they pay a reasonable amount. And since the federal government is spending public money, they have the obligation to ensure the rate is reasonable and pursue disputes when they think it isn't reasonable.
If the federal government didn't act in this way, they'd be on the hook for unreasonable fees every time they lost a case.
A few people are pretty cranky over the size of the bill. Here's my take.
The bill is $80 million for 10 years of work. We have lotteries that pay out that much a few times a year in a single drawing.
I don't know how many full-time equivalent staff-hours went into into it, but if someone wants to put together a law firm whose only job is to take the federal government to task over things like this, I'm happy to chip in $10/year. I'm sure we can find a million other people to do likewise.
All things considered, it sounds like a bargain. Considering the size of the judgement, I bet the plaintiffs wouldn't even blink had they been stuck with the bill. This just sounds like someone is a sore loser.