A bill auditor’s report in a patent infringement case

Bayer successfully brought an infringement and invalidation suit against an inventor, proved inequitable conduct on the inventor’s part, and applied for reimbursement of approximately $4.5 million in attorneys’ fees, $1 million in expenses, and $.68 million in expert witness fees.

A bill auditor, hired as an expert by the inventor, recommended that the court consider only about $1.8 million of the fees, the remainder being “entries which were cryptic, concerned internal conferences, clerical work, delegable tasks, internal memorandum or apparently duplicative work” – altogether accounting for forty percent of the time entries.

If that auditor’s critique was even close to being correct, the law department should be chastened. Its law firm abused it. In the event, the judge allowed one-third of the fees and expenses applied for, and to the absence of documentation none of the expert witness fees due