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The Case of the Overbilling Dickhead

Florida. Overtime Case. Dickheads. Here we go:

Two weeks ago, Chief Judge William Zloch denied attorney Peter Mavrick’s request for attorney fees of around $150,000, giving him instead $4,900 and barring him from receiving any further funds from his client’s settlement. In the case, Mavrick and his opposing counsel, Jeffrey Norkin, worked over three years, made 276 filings, and racked up hundreds of thousands in legal fees.

But the irony here is that the case was a simple, straightforward overtime dispute, where the employee sought only $11,000 from her employer for back wages, and the employer actually settled the case for that amount.

So, what the hell? Well, apparently, the two lawyers didn’t get along very well and the personal dispute between the two led to this unnecessarily protracted litigation of a case that the judge said should’ve taken about 19 hours, instead of the 455 billed by one attorney at $300 an hour. At various times during the course of the case, the lawyers were not on speaking terms, complaints were filed against the Florida bar, the plaintiff was called “a bitch” by opposing counsel, a door was shut on a court reporter, knocking the elderly woman out of her chair, and best of all was this:

After the overtime pay suit was filed, the relationship between Mavrick and Norkin quickly deteriorated. Norkin claimed that when Mavrick called him to schedule a deposition, Mavrick started the conversation by saying, “Dickhead, when can we do this deposition?” “I went around the office, stunned, telling everyone, this guy just called me a dickhead,” Norkin said. But Mavrick claimed that Norkin called him a dickhead, and put the accusation in court papers.

What the lawyers should’ve done, however, was to simply explain to the judge that, according to the Urban Dictionary, “dickhead” is a synonym for lawyer. So, the two were just referring to each other by their more informal titles.

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