For one attorney’s work over a 24-hour stretch, a law firm billed the city of Chicago for 69 hours.
In invoices submitted from another city-hired firm, one staffer was logged working more than 24 hours a day 15 times. For another staffer, at least seven times.
The city paid them all.
Private law firms have submitted tens of thousands of invoices worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the city over the past decade for work to defend federal civil rights lawsuits related to police misconduct. In 2025 alone, the city paid these firms more than $20 million to fight the claims of people whose criminal convictions were overturned in court.
These invoices — hours logged, money paid — represent one of the only available avenues to evaluate how well the Chicago Department of Law is vetting massive bills for which taxpayers ultimately are on the hook.
When the Tribune obtained and analyzed a decade’s worth of these bills, it found the city failed to catch at least 40 instances when a firm billed Chicagoans for a person alleged to have worked more than 24 hours in a day.
Beyond those impossibilities, the analysis found that when the city’s system flags a billing entry for extra scrutiny because someone worked more than 10 hours in a day, a potential sign of overbilling, the city routinely still pays.
These findings come after a Tribune investigation detailed how Chicago’s longtime strategy for handling reversed-conviction cases — hiring expensive private attorneys to wage long legal battles — has run up costs for taxpayers. In fact, the Tribune found, Chicagoans have paid more to resolve these claims, on average, than in New York or Los Angeles.
The Tribune contacted three law firms that submitted billings alleging someone had worked more than 24 hours in a day, and each acknowledged making at least one mistake. In the cases where the errors cost the city extra money, the firms said they made corrections.
The firm Borkan & Scahill, which was responsible for more than half of the 24-hour-plus billings, also told the Tribune in a statement that some entries filed under one person’s name included work performed by others — a practice the city said is not allowed under its rules. Most involved paralegal tasks.
City Corporation Counsel Mary Richardson-Lowry declined the Tribune’s request for an interview. But the law department, in a statement, confirmed it had clawed back money from some firms because of the Tribune’s reporting.
“When questions arose about billing practices, we addressed them directly,” the law department statement said. “In a subset of outside counsel invoices, some billing entries required clarification and review. We met directly with outside counsel firms to reinforce expectations about billing accuracy, staffing, and case management.”
The department did not directly respond to questions the Tribune sent in February about how the city could have let obviously questionable entries slip through in the first place.
In a written statement Tuesday, the department said “invoices that exceed the hours in a day are intolerable” but rare and “not a systemic issue.” More broadly, the law department told the Tribune earlier that it has been working toward a better process to vet bills submitted by its outside attorneys. Late last month, the department modified its guidance for outside law firms to clarify expectations about working excess hours.
“We take seriously our obligation to use taxpayer dollars responsibly, both as attorneys sworn to uphold the law and as taxpayers ourselves,” it said in one statement.
Impossible shifts
Like other major clients of private law firms, the city requires invoices to be filed electronically. They are typically filed monthly for each case and list the number of hours worked by each attorney or other employee, called “timekeepers” in the system, as well as reimbursable expenses such as travel or supplies.
Attorney-client privilege typically shields most details about the legal work each timekeeper performs, but the Tribune was able to obtain other billing and payment data from the city under Illinois’ Freedom of Information Act.
For the years 2016 through 2025, the Tribune wrote computer programming code to identify instances where a firm’s invoice or invoices claimed one of its employees had worked more than 24 hours in a day. Some billings where the amount charged wasn’t enough to cover the number of hours logged were then omitted from the analysis. For example, the data showed one firm charged the city $627 for a lawyer said to have worked 571 hours one day, an entry that made little sense but was not costly for the city.
In other cases, the Tribune couldn’t confirm the city had paid the bill. That left 40 entries from six law firms where someone was logged as working more than 24 hours in a day and the city still paid for that time at the staffer’s full rate.
More than half of those billings occurred in the past two years and involved hours logged for two employees of Borkan & Scahill. Their names and timekeeper codes were logged as working more than 24 hours on a total of 22 separate days.
In a statement to the Tribune, the law firm said those two staffers oversaw a group of paralegals whose work on various cases was coded under the staffers’ names.
“Because of varying needs throughout the year, we do not input a dozen or more separate timekeeper codes for every single paralegal we use on every single file,” the statement said. “Rather, we use the general timekeeper codes of our head paralegals to document these services on invoices.”
The city’s rules for its outside lawyers specify that firms are expected to list the “Name or Timekeeper ID of the person(s) who performed the work billed.”
In another set of entries, the Tribune noticed one of the firm’s attorneys was logged as working more than 28 hours one day in 2024. Borkan & Scahill told the Tribune it brought on two other attorneys to help with cases during a busy week, and those hours were logged under the name of an attorney already approved under the city’s billing system to work on those cases.
“We endeavor on the front end of each case retention to accurately predict the number and identity of attorneys who may be necessary to perform all tasks necessary in each matter,” the firm said in its statement. But in “exceedingly infrequent instances,” it said, the firm has found it necessary to have other lawyers “handle certain tasks on an emergency basis.” The city has approved those attorneys as timekeepers on other cases, it noted.
In one of its statements, the law department said it expects firms to get prior approval from the city before assigning specific staffers to specific cases and then billing for their work.
Borkan & Scahill acknowledged one error regarding an invoice that said one of its top lawyers worked 33.6 hours on one task for one case in 2021. The firm told the Tribune the lawyer had internally logged 3.6 hours and it reimbursed the city once the Tribune brought the error to its attention.
“Our billing staff is generally exceptionally detail oriented on these matters, but they are, of course, human and human error can occur from time to time in any industry,” the statement said.
The Sotos Law Firm also acknowledged to the Tribune that it had erred in telling the city two of its lawyers had worked 59.7 hours and 69.4 hours, respectively, on two dates in 2020.
The firm’s founding and managing partner, James Sotos, said in written responses to the Tribune that the attorneys had input the correct number of hours and the mistakes were clerical errors by the firm’s billing department. He said his firm has reimbursed the city.
Sotos told the Tribune his firm has long made “discretionary” reductions to its invoices after deciding not to pass certain costs on to the city. In the last decade, he wrote, the firm reduced its bills by nearly $400,000 before submitting them and city vetting reduced them further by roughly $1 million.
“We were surprised to learn that these isolated errors were missed by both our billing software and the city’s review process,” he wrote. “We are currently evaluating additional safeguards to prevent a recurrence of this error.”
The Tribune asked the firm Hale & Monico about one instance where an attorney was logged as working 25 hours in one day in 2021. The attorney, Barrett Boudreaux, told the Tribune she mistakenly entered one of her shifts a day early.
Long hours
The law department declined to explain to the Tribune exactly how city officials vet the invoices from law firms or why it paid out on these bills.
The department did say it uses a national electronic billing system, called CounselLink, that flags questionable invoice items. Such systems are part of a cottage industry that has formed in recent decades to help clients vet bills submitted by outside lawyers. The services can analyze all sorts of things, from the specific — such as a hotel bill that exceeded a preset limit — to the more ambiguous, such as whether a lawyer’s description of a task was too vague to be worthy of payment.
Through CounselLink, the department said, the invoices “are reviewed by experienced legal professionals who apply established legal‑industry standards and best practices set forth by our Outside Counsel Guidelines.”
Through a public records request, the Tribune obtained a data set from the law department showing how often invoices are flagged through CounselLink and for what reasons. For work related to federal civil rights lawsuits, the Tribune found the system flagged nearly half of last year’s invoices over at least one category of concern with a fee or expense. The city withheld at least some amount of money for a fourth of the invoices.
To help assess the city’s oversight of these bills, the Tribune dug deeper into a flag that is intended to raise questions about potentially excessive hours.
There is no national standard for how many hours of legal work in a day is too many, but the issue often comes up in arguments to a judge over what legal fees the winning side in a case can recover from the losing side. The lawyers who lost may go through the bills and argue that it was unreasonable for a winning attorney to charge for a large number of hours in a single day — saying the quality of the work diminishes as the workday stretches into the night.
In Chicago, the system flags invoices where a timekeeper was logged as working more than 10 hours a day. But the Tribune’s analysis found it was relatively rare for the city to withhold money on that basis.
In the past decade, the analysis found, the system flagged roughly 1,500 invoices because at least one person was logged as working more than 10 hours in a day. But the city reduced payments to firms for just 139 of them for that reason, less than a tenth of the total.
When the Tribune obtained copies of some of the flagged invoices, those records sometimes showed multiple examples of billings exceeding 10 hours of daily work per timekeeper. For example, one Hale & Monico invoice — covering a month when a case went to trial — included 162 instances where a staffer’s stated work on one or more tasks totaled more than 10 hours that day.
For that 2021 invoice, the city paid for all of those flagged entries to the penny, including a total of $69,242 for time exceeding the 10-hour mark, according to city records.
Of the roughly $472,000 in fees billed on that invoice, the city did withhold payment for one 18-minute task by a paralegal. The amount saved was $27.
Neither the law firm nor the city responded to questions about that task or the 10-hour flags on the invoice.
A law department FOIA officer told the Tribune in an email that no strict rule limits the work of outside legal personnel to 10 hours per day but the flag is used to ensure a city attorney is aware of it during a review of the bill. The department said there are times that it’s “not only unexceptional but expected” its lawyers would work “long hours” during particularly busy times in high-stakes litigation.
When asked about the 10-hour standard, private lawyers working for the city told the Tribune their complex and high-stakes work sometimes requires putting in more than 10 hours a day, particularly as cases go to trial.
“The reality is that, while on trial, most trial attorneys do little more than sleep and eat (the latter oftentimes being done at the same time as doing necessary work),” Borkan & Scahill said in its statement.
Days beyond 10 hours help fuel significant billings for some lawyers, including two from the firm Rock Fusco & Connelly whose billing amounts last year led all attorneys working for the city on this kind of case.
The firm billed the city for nearly $640,000 for Stacy Benjamin’s work defending civil rights lawsuits and more than $525,000 for Eileen Rosen. Of the nearly $1.2 million combined for the pair, roughly $100,000 of it was for daily hours beyond 10, the Tribune found.
By contrast, the main person overseeing the vast majority of reversed-conviction cases for the law department is a deputy corporation counsel paid roughly $205,000 a year. In addition to Benjamin and Rosen, three other private attorneys whose work that city legal staffer helps oversee had billings in 2025 that were at least double her salary.
When the Tribune asked Rock Fusco & Connelly about the billings, Rosen responded in a statement that the firm’s attorneys working on reversed-conviction cases offer specialized, skilled and ethical representation. According to their online Rock Fusco & Connelly biographies, both she and Benjamin are former law department staffers who supervised other city attorneys defending such lawsuits before each left for private practice.
“We have built a strong reputation for providing high-quality, trusted legal service and conducting our billing practices with integrity and transparency. We are committed to doing our work with professionalism, and respect for the public resources entrusted to us,” Rosen said in the statement.
Changes underway
Last fall, the law department began what it described as a pilot project for “new billing protocols and additional layers of review by introducing a third-party managed bill review service to improve invoice compliance.”
The city said that effort followed a “tiered review” process that involved a “third-party review” that began last year and “continues to be rolled out throughout 2026.”
In its statement to the Tribune, the department said the pilot program had shaved an average of 6.5% off bills, and it would be expanded this spring. It also noted how, in 2024, the administration of Mayor Brandon Johnson updated the guidelines for outside lawyers “to reinforce expectations for billing practices.”
In late March, the Johnson administration updated the guidelines again. The revision came a month after the Tribune pointed out questionable billing entries to the law department, although the department told the Tribune on Tuesday that the timing of the latest revision was based on “work initiated in 2025” to update the 2024 guidelines.
The newest guidelines, which already required that invoices specify the names of the people who performed the work, were revised to add a provision that specifically prohibited firms “from ‘sharing’ timekeeper accounts to bill multiple staff under one staff member’s account.” Firms that did so risk not only having invoices rejected but losing future business.
The guidelines now also contain a rule on “long billing days” — saying the city expects that attorneys and staffers won’t bill for more than 10 hours a day if they are not preparing for or attending a significant case event, such as a deposition, major hearing or trial.
“We believe work attention and productivity decrease over long work hours, and long work days tend to be filled with interruptions and competing priorities that reduce total billable hours,” the new rules state. “The City expects outside counsel to be efficient with their work.”
