MARI HENRY LEIGH - Meckler Bulger Tilson Marick and Pearson LLP

In a time when clients pay closer and closer
attention to legal bills, Mari Henry Leigh has
helped develop a unique practice that helps
clients monitor, review, and sometimes even
challenge attorney fees.
This practice may not always make her the
most popular lawyer in the room, but it
sometimes makes her the most important
lawyer in the room.
Leigh chairs the litigation management and
attorney fee practice group at Meckler,
Bulger, Tilson, Marick & Pearson LLP (MBT)
and manages about a dozen attorneys,
accountants and paralegals. She litigates and
provides legal and expert witness consulting
services regarding attorney fee and legal fee
disputes, legal audits and auditing, legal bill
reviews and attorney ethics, legal malpractice,
and litigation management.
Leigh first envisioned her practice after MBT
Co-Chair Bruce Meckler asked her to assist
analyzing attorneys’ fees in a case so hotly
contested it ultimately proved worthy of Wall
Street Journal coverage.
“There weren’t a lot of people really suited
to it, who could understand the numbers,
could see patterns in those numbers, and
could see the big picture,” says 54-year-old
Leigh. “It’s not about winning the case. It’s
about taking the roof off the law firm’s
structure and looking down and saying how
the case was run, how the work was allocated,
and was the work done efficiently. To be able
to do that, you’ve got to know what the work
entails. You’ve got to have done the work
yourself at one point in time.”
Building a Career
Born in Rensselaer, Ind., she learned a
strong work ethic from her family. Her mother
worked as a home economist who led 4H. She
and her three brothers spent a lot of time on
the fairgrounds because of their mother’s
profession.
She graduated from Purdue University in
1980 and Case Western Reserve University
School of Law in 1983. She worked as an
associate trial attorney at Bensech, Friedlander,
Coplan & Aronoff in Cleveland from 1983 until
1990, moving to Chicago that year when she
joined Phelan, Pope & John.
Leigh describes Phelan, Pope & John as
one of the best trial firms in the city, where
SM
MARI HENRY LEIGH
associates regularly squared-off for the best
cases and partner attention.
“It was a very aggressive place to be,” she
says. “I think in some ways the firm thrived on
that. They liked that gladiator—Hunger Games
kind of situation.”
Leigh moved to Lord Bissell & Brook in
1993, a year before Pope & John disbanded.
While she worked at Lord Bissell, a group of
lawyers from Pope & John decided to form
their own firm. They asked Leigh to join them.
In 1994, she moved to the new firm—what
would become MBT—and became partner
No. 7.
“That was the time when we all sat around
the table and made the decisions together
because we were small enough to do that,” she
recalls. “I think we had 12 partners and 12 or 13
associates when we first started. MBT now has
over 100 attorneys and four offices nationally.”
Expertise in Analyzing Fees
While working in Cleveland at Bensech,
Friedlander, Coplan & Aronoff, she got to
sample different practice areas, which has
helped her enormously throughout her career.
But in the end, litigation won out. The firm
required associates to pick their first and
second choice of practice area, and then the
practice areas “bid” on which associate to
take. She made herself indispensable to all the
practices she worked in and refused to put
down a second choice. She figured the firm
would rather give her the choice of litigation
Trailblazing in the Practice
of Legal Bill Review
by Olivia Clarke
than lose a talented lawyer.
Her plan worked because she joined the
litigation practice.
“Not many cases go to trial,” she says. “You
have to have 25 cases on your docket and
hope that one or two go to trial. If it smelled
like a trial I tried to get myself on it. I did
antitrust work, bankruptcy, products liability
and a lot of personal-injury work.
“I’ve always practiced on the idea that to be
a really great trial lawyer, you’ve got to be ready
to try the next big thing. It’s not about being a
particular trial lawyer. It’s about being a trial
lawyer. You need to be ready to try anything.”
Leigh’s love of deposing experts made
working as a consultant a natural segue.
She realized an opportunity existed to help
create a practice group and really go deeper
into this area.
They created software to analyze fees,
developed expertise, and the practice grew.
It started as about 25 percent of her practice,
but it soon engulfed her life as a lawyer.
“It was not until five years ago that I realized
that I’m probably not going back to my
litigation practice full-time,” she says. “It’s a
great practice, and I get to do a lot of things
that I wouldn’t get to do as a trial attorney, and
I think in a long-range plan it is something I
can continue to do.”
Her clientele varies, but a large part of the
firm’s work in this area comes from fee disputes
where a third party gets asked to pay the fees.
Another scenario involves a party coming to

the firm because it’s been presented with a bill
for $40 million in attorney fees and it has no
way of knowing if the amount is reasonable.
Or, a court may decide that the prevailing
party gets to collect its reasonable fees from
the other party, and Leigh and her firm must
figure out what “reasonable” means.
The firm also gets hired on the front end of
large-scale mass tort litigation matters to
manage and direct the litigation by writing
billing guidelines and helping create controls
and procedures to control the fees.
An in-house counsel may ask for help with
handling with the day-to-day litigation needs
of complex cases because “a case or cases
can threaten to absorb a disproportionate
amount of an in-house counsel’s time and
they can’t allow that to happen because they
are too valuable and are needed elsewhere.”
For example, one of the first times the firm got
called in to do that was for a pharmaceutical
company. A legal matter that should take the
in-house counsel 20 percent of his time took
80 percent.
“The reason we can do this so well is
because we are practicing attorneys,” she says.
“All the software that we have makes us do
our work smarter and more efficiently, but it
can’t replace the fact that in the end someone
has to analyze it. That’s what we bring: our
skill as attorneys and that judgment and the
experience that we have.”
‘Utterly Brilliant’
To help fellow trial attorneys and litigation
professionals become better litigation
managers, Leigh proposed that the Claims
and Litigation Management Alliance (CLM)
create a Litigation Management Institute (LMI).
Successful graduates of LMI earn a first-of-itskind
professional designation as a Certified
Litigation Management Professional or CLMP.
The CLMP designation goes to graduates of
an intensive training program at Columbia Law
School in New York. The inaugural class of 100
lawyers and claims professionals graduated
in October 2011, and Leigh distributed their
diplomas during the ceremony.
“Law schools don’t prepare you for this,”
she says. “They don’t teach you about how to
delegate work, how to staff a case, how to talk
to people. They don’t teach you any of the real
practical tools you need to get the work done.
It’s a lot of theory. Let’s teach people a lot of
what we are doing, which is managing a case
on the front end so you are not on the back
end as the target of a fee dispute.”
Adam Potter, executive director of the CLM,
says many lawyers now seek admission to the
program that Leigh envisioned. He likens the
SM
program to an executive MBA program
because of the level of difficulty. Leigh stays
involved in the program by creating the case
studies for the program.
“Dynamic—that’s the best way to describe
Mari,” Potter says. “She’s a go-getter who gets
things done and she’s a wealth of information
and a good person.
“She’s perceived as the granddaddy of legal
billing review. If there are any significant
issues, Mari is one of the first attorneys that
people go to. You never know what she’s
going to think of next.”
When asked to discuss the cases she and
her partners recently handled, she faced some
difficulty because so much confidentiality
exists among them. She handles between
seven and eight cases at one time and works
about 16 hours a day in the heat of a case to
meet deadlines.
Lawrence Beemer, national claim director for
Fireman’s Fund Insurance Co., counts himself
among Leigh’s clients. She first handled a
major billing dispute case for the company. The
company continues to work with her on a
number of cases. He admires her outstanding
ethics on each matter she handles.
“She’s utterly brilliant,” he says. “She has
become an expert in her niche market of bill
review and she’s coupled that with a robust
background in defending all sorts of different
kinds of cases. She and her people have built
a very complex billing review system that can
handle lots of variables and it’s very impressive.”
When not practicing law, she enjoys spending
time with her three sons: Garrett, 26; Devin,
24; and Mason, 20. She gardens, cooks, and
travels with friends. In 2009, Leigh took
motorcycle lessons with two of her sons and
occasionally rides the back roads of Illinois.
Meckler describes Leigh as tenacious and
tireless. “Once she is on something, she misses
nothing. Mari helped build this (practice) with me.
“She’s a wonderful person and mother and
compassionate and cares about family and
about our practice and firm. People come first
to her. Even with all the pressures of life and
family, she’s been able to achieve what I
consider a real position of excellence in our
practice, in our firm, and around the country.” ■
This article originally appeared in Leading Lawyers Network Magazine—Women’s Edition for 2012 and has been reprinted with permission. © 2012 Law Bulletin Publishing Co.