Fees

In Manhattan, the Reorganization Managers of the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad--J. & W. Seligman & Co. and Hallgarten & Co.--are asking for $2,364,249 including $750,000 for counsel fees. They are represented by Cravath, Henderson & De Gersdorff and Larkin, Rathbone & Perry; and the Interstate Commerce Commission is holding a series of hearings to determine the "reasonableness" of these charges.

A number of prominent lawyers, including Alfred Jaretzki, of Sullivan & Cromwell, and Edward Cornell, of Davies, Auerbach & Cornell, testified last week that they believed the counsel fees of $750,000 were "reasonable" and paid a high tribute to the legal talents of the late E. C. Henderson. Mr. Jaretzki said he thought $500 a day was a reasonable fee and W. W. Miller pointed out that ex-U. S. Senator James A. O'Gorman, as referee in the Gould estate accounting proceedings, was being compensated at the rate of $65 an hour or $520 a day. American corporation lawyers are, in some instances, unquestionably the highest paid professional men in the world. Who's Who in America states that Samuel Untermyer was paid a fee of $775,000 for services in connection with the merger of the Boston Consolidated, the Nevada Consolidated and the Utah Copper Companies. The late Levy Mayer, senior partner of Mayer, Myer, Austrian & Platt, of Chicago, is credited with having received at least one fee of approximately $500,000. Both Messrs. Untermyer and Mayer are Virginians by birth, and were born in the same year (1858).

Other corporation lawyers, who are known to have received princely fees, are Frank Hamline Scott, of Scott, Bancroft, Martin & Stephens, of Chicago; Richard Vliet Lindabury, of Newark, counsel for the U. S. Steel Corporation; Judge Henry Samuel Priest, of St. Louis; William Gibbs McAdoo, of Los Angeles.

Fees in criminal cases have never been so high. Clarence L. Darrow received a fee of about $50,000, besides a liberal allowance for expenses, for defending the McNamara brothers (1911) in Los Angeles. This is generally believed to have been a record equalled only by the fee paid Delphin Michael Delmas in the first Thaw trial.

The Canons of Ethics of the American Bar Association provide, with respect to charges for legal services, that it is proper to consider: 1) the time and labor required and the novelty and difficulty of the question involved; 2) whether the acceptance of employment in a particular case will preclude counsel from appearing in other cases likely to arise out of the same transaction; 3) the customary charges for similar services; 4) the amount involved in the controversy and the benefits resulting to the client; 5) the certainty or the uncertainty of the compensation; 6) the character of the employment, whether casual or for an established and constant client