The legislation corporations, funding banks and consulting corporations working with FTX on its chapter case billed the crypto change a mixed $34.18 million in January, court docket paperwork reveal.
FTX’s chief restructuring officer and new CEO, John J. Ray III, additionally acquired a hefty pay bundle, charging $1,300 an hour to a complete of $305,000 in February based on a Mar. 6 submitting.
Separate court docket filings on Mar. 6 present United States legislation corporations Sullivan & Cromwell, Quinn Emmanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and Landis Rath & Cobb invoiced $16.9 million, $1.44 million and $684,000 respectively for his or her companies and bills in January.
Attorneys and employees of Sullivan & Cromwell billed a complete of 14,569 hours for his or her work, which equates to over 600 days. Some companions acquired as much as $2,165 per hour whereas the agency’s paralegals and authorized analysts had been making do with between $425-$595 per hour.
The best-priced billables had been discovery ($3.5 million), asset disposition ($2.2 million) and common investigation work ($2 million).
It submitted one other hefty $7.5 million invoice to FTX for the primary 19 days of February.
Ray performed an important function in retaining Sullivan & Cromwell on board as authorized counsel, having filed a court docket movement on Jan. 17 arguing that Sullivan & Cromwell had been integral in taking management over the “dumpster hearth” that was handed to him.
His submitting got here in response to an objection to the retention of the legislation agency on Jan. 14 by U.S. Trustee Andrew Vara, who claimed that Sullivan & Cromwell had didn’t sufficiently disclose its connections and prior work for FTX.
FTX’s particular counsel Landis Rath & Cobb spent a lot of its working hours attending court docket hearings and litigation procedures. For its efforts, the agency billed the FTX directors $684,000 together with bills.
Between the three legislation corporations, over 180 attorneys and over 50 non-lawyer employees labored on the case, most of who got here from Sullivan & Cromwell.
Forensics consulting agency AlixPartners billed $2.1 million for January. Nearly half of the agency’s hours had been spent on forensic evaluation of decentralized finance (DeFi) merchandise and tokens in FTX’s possession.
Consulting agency Alvarez & Marsal invoiced for $12.5 million for over 17,100 hours it dedicated to avoidance actions, monetary evaluation and accounting procedures.
Associated: Breaking down FTX’s chapter: The way it differs from different Chapter 11 instances
Funding financial institution Perella Weinberg Companions billed a month-to-month service payment of $450,000 plus greater than $50,000 in bills for planning a restructuring technique and interesting in correspondence with third events.
With FTX’s trial set for October, there are at the least one other six months of authorized work to do for the legislation corporations concerned. Latest studies have estimated that the charges may attain within the a whole lot of hundreds of thousands by the point the case is over, which may probably rival the $440 million in charges that New York-based legislation agency Weil Gotshal made from the notorious Lehman Brothers chapter in 2008.
