Law firms, investment banks and consulting firms that worked with FTX on its bankruptcy case charged the cryptocurrency exchange $34.18 million in fees in January, according to court documents.
FTX’s chief restructuring officer and new CEO, John J. Ray III, was also well paid, charging $1,300 an hour in February for a total of $305,000, according to a March 6 filing. Separate court documents dated March 6 show that U.S. law firms Sullivan & Cromwell, Quinn Emmanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and Landis Rath & Cobb were billed $16.9 million, $1.44 million and $684,000, respectively, for their services and fees in January. bill.
In total, attorneys and staff at the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell were paid for their work for 14,569 hours, equivalent to more than 600 days. Some partners make as much as $2,165 an hour, while the firm's paralegals and legal analysts make $425 to $595 an hour.
The highest fees were paid for discovery ($3.5 million), asset disposition ($2.2 million) and general investigative work ($2 million). It submitted another massive bill of $7.5 million to FTX in the first 19 days of February. Ray played a key role in securing Sullivan & Cromwell as legal counsel, filing a court motion on Jan. 17 arguing that the white-shoe law firm played a role in controlling the "dumpster fire" entrusted to him. an indispensable role.
His filing was in response to a Jan. 14 objection by U.S. trustee Andrew Vara to retaining the law firm, which claimed that Sullivan & Cromwell had failed to adequately disclose its connection to and prior work with FTX.
FTX Special Counsel Landis Rath & Cobb spends most of his work time attending court hearings and proceedings. For this, the company billed FTX administrators $684,000, including fees.
Across the three law firms, more than 180 attorneys and more than 50 non-lawyers were involved in the case, most of them from Sullivan & Cromwell.
Forensics consulting firm AlixPartners billed $2.1 million in January. Almost half of the company’s time is spent on forensic analysis of FTX-owned decentralized financial products and tokens. Consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal, which invoiced $12.5 million in more than 17,100 hours, promised avoidance action, financial analysis and accounting procedures.
Investment bank Perella Weinberg Partners charges $450,000 a month for its services, plus more than $50,000 in restructuring strategic planning and communications with third parties.
With the FTX trial scheduled for October, the law firms involved still have at least six more months of legal work to do. Recent reports estimate that the fee could reach hundreds of millions of dollars by the end of the case, which could rival the $440 million New York-based law firm Weil Gotshal received for the notorious 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers.
