MITCHELL SMITH was 23 when he lost most of his right arm and his dream of becoming a police officer.
Now at 30 and three years after he had thought his legal action was finished, he has also lost faith in his solicitors, Keddies Lawyers.
Mr Smith says he may have been charged inflated and sometimes duplicated legal fees.
He plans to file a complaint with the legal regulator about his bill, which included more than $9000 for photocopying and charges for compiling the bill.
This month a Supreme Court-appointed costs assessor began work on Mr Smith's objection to the total of $320,230.24 in fees and other expenses that were retained from his total compensation settlement of $1.5 million.
Keddies has rejected Mr Smith's complaint but has declined to provide further details, saying the firm would respond in opposing his costs application, which is yet to be determined by the court.
A range of lawyers the Herald consulted say the $261,634.99, including GST, that Keddies charged in their professional fees appears "grossly excessive" and "outrageous", and should have been closer to $50,000 given Keddies's involvement in the file and the relatively uncomplicated nature of the claim.
This was largely due to the fact that another firm - Stacks/Goudkamp - had done much of the preparatory work over two years before reaching the point of informal settlement with NRMA in mid-2004.
NRMA was the insurer of the car that hit Mr Smith. He was riding his yellow 1000cc Suzuki motorcycle along Canterbury Road on the night of February 8, 2002, when the car turned suddenly in front of him.
The former funeral parlour assistant and ice-rink official hit the kerb and was flung 40 metres, irreparably crushing his arm and causing a closed head injury that left him in a coma for a week.
By mid-2004 Stacks/Goudkamp had indicated they were in a position to settle his case. But Mr Smith, unhappy with the thought of possible compensation of as low as about $750,000 - the only figure he can recall from the range put to him - suddenly, on the recommendation of a friend, switched to Keddies.
One year later, after attending a settlement conference with NRMA, Mr Smith was "very happy" to walk away with a cheque for $1 million. More than $140,000 was reimbursed to official agencies including Centrelink and the Health Insurance Commission. Mr Smith said he had the impression that Keddies bent over backwards to get $1 million.
"It seemed a pretty big deal that they had been able to get that much for me," Mr Smith recalled of the conference on July 19, 2005.
"I couldn't understand why there were all these back-and-forth negotiations. It's not like I was trying to fake a lost arm.
"I was prepared to go to court [but] that [$1 million net] was what I thought was all I could get."
Later, travelling home to Riverwood with his cheque, he says: "All I can remember is that one piece of paper in my pocket on the train." Mr Smith has no recollection of receiving a bill, although Keddies maintains it gave him one the day he received his cheque.
Mr Smith's case had not been overly complicated, say lawyers who have reviewed documents in his case. He had lost an arm but NRMA had claimed some contributory negligence, which was denied.
Mr Smith's Keddies solicitor, Stephen Morgan, one of a group of accredited specialists in personal injury at Keddies, charged $390 an hour at the time of Mr Smith's case - the same as the firm's three partners.
The firm charged him $261,634.99 for its costs plus another $58,595.25 in disbursements - expenses that included more than $15,000 in barristers' fees and $3.20 for a bus ticket, inclusive of GST.
Disbursements in Mr Smith's Keddies bill also included $9000 for photocopying and another three items for District Court photocopying totalling $386.75. As well, 35 separate items of photocopying time - in addition to time spent "waiting for photocopier" at the District Court - were included in the bill within the firm's professional costs. Mr Smith requested an itemised bill from Mr Morgan in June this year, after a series of articles published in the Herald on multiple complaints about the firm to the legal regulator, the Office of the Legal Services Commissioner.
Numerous complaints about Keddies have been discontinued and files closed by the commissioner, some after the complaints were withdrawn following settlements between the complainants and Keddies.
No complaint against Keddies has been the subject of any formal action. A number have been under investigation for more than a year, and one is still going on after two years. The firm's managing partner, Russell Keddie, has reiterated several times his confidence that every remaining complaint will eventually be dismissed by the commissioner, Steve Mark. A Keddies Lawyers spokesman said yesterday that Mr Smith had been "delighted with the result and made no complaint so it is surprising he is now raising concerns some 3½ years later".
Six weeks after his request, a non-itemised bill was provided to Mr Smith by Keddies with no information for him to determine the time taken on each item of the firm's work, or the staff member who performed it, or its individual cost.
"Just looking at the bill was infuriating," Mr Smith says about bill items that included leaving him telephone messages.
"I thought, 'How dare you. You are supposed to be on my side. I am trusting you'. Nine thousand dollars for photocopying pieces of paper? I don't think so. I feel like this is just greed on my loss."
Several lawyers and a forensic accountant have scrutinised the information in Mr Smith's bill. Each pointed out that it was not a proper bill as it included merely the date and the type of work carried out. They agree the total charged was "clearly not able to be matched with the amount of work done", which prompted one solicitor with long experience in personal injury cases to suggest that more Keddies clients might like to review their bills.
A former costs assessor, who described the limited information in the bill as "a joke", suggested that the firm's computerised work-in-progress ledger should be studied as part of the current costs assessment.
"There does not appear to be significant progress in the matter, yet there is this massive account," he said. The bill includes 14 instances of "diarising", seven of "general filing" as well as amending, sorting, photocopying and leaving telephone messages - none of which would normally be allowed in a line-by-line costs assessment. Seventeen instances of reviewing the file, two of
them on the same day, were also included.
Billing to "diarise a conference date for the solicitor's diary" was "despicable", one of the solicitors consulted said.
After just over a year with his second firm, Mr Smith was happy to accept $1 million net to him as the best possible result that could be negotiated.
It allowed him to "get on with my life" after nearly four years of stress.
Diane Smith recalls all her only child told her about his bill was "that he got $1.5 million [in total] and that he got $1 million himself". She assumed the large amount taken in legal fees was not abnormal.
Although he initially returned to work, Mr Smith could no longer manage his former duties with one arm. His employment choices greatly reduced, he toyed with studying for a private detective's licence but remains unemployed while he considers his options.
A spokesman for Keddies said yesterday: "Mr Smith came to us unhappy with the efforts of his previous lawyers so we took on his case and achieved a payout more than double the insurer's previous offer in what was a difficult and complex case.
"Keddies has a reputation of fighting hard for clients and achieving the best results. Our fees are appropriate for the work we do and the results we achieve."
