Left:Rudy Giuliani talks to reporters as he leaves the federal courthouse in Washington in Dec. 2023 (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana). Right: U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane (Southern District of New York court photo).
In an opposition filing submitted in his dismissed bankruptcy case, Rudy Giuliani is trying to cut the professional fees he owes a forensic financial advisor nearly in half, claiming that he was “overbilled.”
The Wednesday filing from Giuliani attorney Heath Berger before U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane asserted that Global Data Risk employees “routinely engaged in […] duplicative billing” and did too much research into the finances of the disbarred former NYC mayor and Donald Trump ally who faces 2020 election-related criminal charges and substantial civil liabilities.
“A review of the Billing and Expense Details demonstrates that the employees and staff of GDR routinely engaged in such duplicative billing in that multiple individual timekeepers charged for attendance at the same event, meeting, or discussion and/or completion of the same service, thereby creating duplicative time entries for any given single service,” court documents said. “Not only do several entries bear the same time, data, and task description with minuted changes, some even appear to be copied and pasted entirely.”
What’s more, Giuliani argued, the claimed amount of time spent on research over five months was “excessive.”
“Give months for 270.5 hours of research for one debtor, often repetitive, seems to be inflated, if not excessive,” the filing said.
In August, Global Data Risk filed its fee application and demanded $324,843.75 for some “1,181.25 hours of services” and $6,854.29 more in expenses racked up over the course of the bankruptcy, totaling the ask at $331,698.04.
Giuliani has now objected to that number to the extent that he demands a reduction of nearly half that amount of money (roughly 46 percent). When subtracting $151,662.50 from the tab, what remains is $180,035.54. Of note, when an agreement to toss the case was finally reached, Giuliani had to put $100,000 into an escrow account to cover part of Global Data Risk’s estimated professional fees. In essence, this seems to mean that, under Giuliani’s proposal, he would need to fork over $80,035.54 more.
Though no small sum for many, Judge Lane memorably remarked during a wide-ranging and at times heated hearing in July that Giuliani was fortunate that the Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors was represented by the law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP on a pro bono basis, otherwise the hundreds of thousands in estimated Global Data Risk fees that startled his lawyer could realistically have been “much higher.”
After all, Giuliani was the one who voluntarily filed under Chapter 11 following the $148 million defamation judgment awarded to Georgia Election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, only to drag out the bankruptcy case without much progress other than procedural gamesmanship and months-long disputes over his lack of financial transparency, the latter of which prompted the creditors committee — Moss, Dominion Voting Systems, and Giuliani sexual assault accuser Noelle Dunphy — to hire Global Data Risk in the first place.
That lack of specificity about Giuliani’s finances once sparked the frustrated judge to threaten putting the former NYC in the witness box to testify under oath, so it bears watching whether Lane will warm to the fee reduction request.
To Giuliani, however, it’s clear he’s been “overbilled due to duplicative time entries” and “excessive research related services.”
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