The U.S. Trustee Program has announced that its proposals requiring extensive disclosure related to law firm fee requests would apply only to very large chapter 11 bankruptcies, the New York Law Journal reported today. In narrowing the scope of cases to which the proposals would apply—to those with $50 million or more in assets and $50 million or more in liabilities as opposed to cases with a combined $50 million in assets and liabilities—the agency was responding to intense criticism from firms calling "burdensome" and "ethically unacceptable" the agency's new recommendations for attorneys' fee applications. The trustee program has modified proposals for disclosure of rates in non-bankruptcy practices, and said that it would continue to seek budgets and staffing plans, either by consent of the parties or court order. Unchanged from the originally proposed guidelines, firms would still have to submit in their fee applications the number of rate increases since the inception of the case and disclose the effect of any rate increases on the total compensation a firm is seeking.
