A fee examiner tasked with keeping costs down in the American Airlines bankruptcy recommended this week that a court approve nearly $400 million in fees and expenses earned by professionals who he said engineered "perhaps the most efficient airline reorganization case on record,” the Wall Street Journal reported today. Robert Keach, an attorney from Maine, made the request in a series of filings on Tuesday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan. Keach recommended paying $371.7 million in fees and $16.3 million in expenses to 47 professional firms, including lawyers, accountants, aircraft consultants and other advisers. A handful of firms who submitted fees after a deadline will be included in separate requests, he said. The final fee and expense tallies cover work completed from the November 2011 inception of former American Airlines parent AMR Corp.'s chapter 11 case through the approval of its bankruptcy-exit plan 23 months later. American Airlines exited bankruptcy through a historic merger with US Airways Group Inc. — initially opposed and later cleared by the Justice Department — that created the world's largest airline. American also used its bankruptcy proceeding to negotiate deep concessions from its main labor unions, ultimately cutting about $1 billion in annual labor costs. Nancy Rapoport, a bankruptcy law professor at University of Nevada at Las Vegas who has served as a fee examiner in large chapter 11 cases, said the appointment of Keach at the beginning of the case was crucial to keeping costs down. "These fees would have been way higher" if Keach hadn't created ground rules governing what could and couldn't be charged, Rapoport said.
