It was more than three years ago that the Sydney Morning Herald broke a series of stories about clients being overcharged by the personal injuries law firm Keddies. The allegations were cringe-inducing and people were suitably aghast.

The articles flushed out more complaints from people who claimed to have been ripped off by the firm. up to 100 clients may have been affected by overcharging on an industrial scale, but there has been no mad rush to redress the problem.

After a couple of interlocutory skirmishes, the one and only disciplinary case against a former partner of the firm, Russell Keddie, and a hapless employed solicitor, Phillip Scroope, gets under way in the Administrative Decisions Tribunal on April 30. That’s more than 2½ years after the action started in the tribunal.

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About the time Keddies was acquired for $35 million last year by a bigger personal injuries firm, Slater & Gordon, Keddie made some admissions, saying he alone was responsible for the overcharging in the matter that is the subject of the complaint.

The Legal Services Commissioner, who is the legal profession’s disciplinary authority in NSW, then withdrew the complaints against another two former partners, Tony Barakat and Scott Roulstone.

The disciplinary proceedings concern the case of Shuang Ying Meng, who was left a paraplegic after a bus crash in South Australia nearly 10 years ago. Her case was not complicated because liability was not an issue and the matter was settled.

Mrs Meng told Herald reporter Kate McClymont that she did not receive a bill from Keddies and it was not until she went to the commission with a complaint that it emerged she had been charged $800,000 in legal fees and other charges out of a total settlement of $3.5 million. Cost experts have said this is about 10 times the amount that would be fair.

The reason that only one disciplinary case remains is largely because Keddies’s partners have been rushing around stuffing money in the pockets of various former clients in exchange for getting them to withdraw their complaints to the Legal Services Commissioner.

A glimpse at the dimension of Keddies’ overcharging emerged last week in a civil action against the one-time partners brought by a former client, Eileen Liu. Ms Liu had also withdrawn her disciplinary complaint after coming to an ”agreement” to accept $15,000 from Keddies.

Still, she pressed on with a breach-of-contract action, claiming that she was billed for work that was not performed or not done at the agreed rate. hers was a relatively small case that was settled for $140,000, from which the client received less than $50,000.

Judge Jim Curtis thoughtfully spelled out more than a dozen instances of overcharging. The fee ledger comprised 383 items of ”attendance” or work, and this was for a motor vehicle accident case in which liability had been admitted and the insurance company was wanting to settle.

For instance, three-line letters that would take a few seconds to read were billed for 12 minutes of time at a senior litigation lawyer rate of $435 an hour (a charge of $87).

Another five-line letter was billed at $184 for ”perusal” – that is a time charge of 24 minutes.

There was a charge of 18 minutes at the rate of $460 an hour for sending a four-sentence email to the Motor Accident Authority.

Back came the reply from the case manager at the authority. It simply said ”Rcvd”. A Keddies solicitor entered a charge in the ledger of $130.50 for reading the abbreviation ”Rcvd”.

Secretaries in the firm were being billed out at partners’ rates of $460 an hour charging for ”perusing and considering” two-line letters.

On and on it went.

Most of the responses and form-filling is of a pro forma nature. It involves typing a name in a computerised template, but the work is billed as through the documents were created from scratch.

Ms Liu’s case is only one of about 100 against Keddies in the District Court at the moment.

The former chief justice James Spigelman spoke frequently about the perils of time-based billing and the legal profession killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

At this year’s opening of law term dinner, the president of the NSW Law Society, Stuart Westgarth, defended time-based billing. Criticism of it was ”unpersuasive”, he said.

We asked the Law Society for its response to Judge Curtis’ findings in the Liu case. we haven’t heard back.

justinian@lawpress.com.au

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Small cases, big bills: Keddies working overtime to kill complaints