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Bankruptcy bills... and unpaid invoices

By Pamela Jones et al.

More applications for compensation in the SCO bankruptcy, by both Dorsey & Whitney and by Pachulski Stang Ziehl & Jones. It's going to be interesting to see who gets paid in this saga, in the end, particularly if SCO gets sent into Chapter 7.

The bills are very different from the early bankruptcy salad days. For example, Dorsey & Whitney bills $1.92 for computer research expense for the period of March 1 to April 30, according to Exhibit B. I'm a paralegal and I can't imagine how they get to a figure like that. Well. I *could* imagine. They were in a deep sleep, woke up in a panic thinking they forgot to research something for SCO, ran to the computer and hit PACER, only to realize after a few seconds that needing to do research for SCO's bankruptcy now was just a bad dream. Kidding. If you look on page 15 of Exhibit D, it's a bill for "Pacer Service Center Electronic Court Searches." Hmm. My theory takes wings.

Looking through Exhibit A, I see research for a few minutes on page 3 on the subject of updating critical dates memorandum "with respect to recently filed pleadings". But then on the costs, I see an entry on 3/11 for PACER charges of $4.32 and more on the 27th for .08, for a total PACER charge of $13.44. You know how I interpret this? No one cares about legal research now. One does what one must. And that's it. The money spigot is shutting down.

And if you notice in Exhibit D, the paralegal is spending more time on the case than the sole partner and the sole associate, on pages 7 and 8. Ooh. Page 14. Unpaid invoices. "Telephone conference with E. Schnable regarding letter to SCO regarding unpaid invoices".

what? what? what?

I thought SCO just told the court at the last hearing that SCO was keeping up with bills. Well. That explains it all.

This has a certain karmic ring, don't you think? These law firms all fought as a group to help SCO avoid paying Novell until the great bye and bye, at the earliest, if ever. And here they are, with unpaid invoices. Perfection.

Full post as published by Groklaw on May 16, 2009 (boomark / email).