West Virginia Public Defender Billing Review Uncovers Egregious Overbilling Case

Public defender Michael Cooke was given a two-year suspension from
practicing law due to egregious overbilling. Photo: Shutterstock

After West Virginia lawmakers refused to increase the hourly pay for court-appointed lawyers, the state’s Public Defender Service decided it was time to crack down on suspected overbilling by attorneys who were working as court-appointed public defenders.

At a recent hearing at the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, PDS Executive Director Dana Eddy testified that his review of attorneys’ billing practices found that a number of them were billing more than 15 hours a day on a regular basis. Those lawyers’ billings were flagged for review. They found that of about 800 attorneys doing court-appointed work, 100 were overbilling.

The overbilling case that was the focus of the testimony before the Supreme Court of Appeals was regarding Michael Cooke, who had billed more than 15 hours a day on 37 occasions over an eight-month period in 2014. On five of those days, he billed more than 20 hours, and on two days he billed for more than 24 hours.

Cooke stated that he billed the work of two contract lawyers as his own, which is why there were days in which he billed for more than 24 hours.

“However, per Cooke’s own testimony, this would have occurred for only some portion of the time period at issue inasmuch as his ‘full-time; contract attorney quit in late March, leaving only the part-time contract attorney, who likewise quit at some point later that year,” the judiciary panel wrote in its decision.

Cooke was also supposed to serve as a guardian ad litem and a mental hygiene commissioner, and he apparently wasn’t able to perform those duties well, either.

Cooke testified that he’d failed to file a guardian ad litem brief because he suffered from low testosterone, which caused him to sleep from 10 to 16 hours a day. He provided documentation attesting to his medical condition.

“Per Cooke’s own testimony, therefore, during this time there would have been between only eight and fourteen hours of the day in which he could even be awake to perform work,” the panel wrote, but “for three different dates during this period…Cooke still ostensibly billed 15.7, 19.4, and 13.3 hours, respectively, after deducting the time which he attributed to other attorneys.”

The judges also found that Cooke’s itemization of the work he performed on those three days did not fully account for the billed hours.

Eddy believed Cooke’s problems were due to “a complete lack of organization” and that he lacked “any nefarious purpose.”

The Supreme Court of Appeals disagreed.

“We find that Cooke’s misconduct warrants a two-year suspension from the practice of law,” the justices wrote. “Cooke’s defrauding of the State through overbilling, gross mishandling of a client matter and funds, his dereliction of duty to his infant clients as a guardian ad litem—all of which is compounded by his unrelenting pattern of unresponsiveness and empty reassurances of remediation—plainly justify this degree of discipline.”