[CWG-Stewardship] Legal cost reality

Jonathan Robinson jrobinson at afilias.info
Sat Jun 27 05:07:51 UTC 2015


All,

 

At this stage, we have not seen detailed bills. The bill signed off by the
board will have been for the work of Sidley on both CCWG & CWG (to the best
of my knowledge).

I expect the work was most intense as they got up to speed with all of the
background information and work of both groups.

 

That said, I think we do need to work hard to control / manage bills and
that was part of the motivation for having the client committee in the first
place.

A key question for us as a group is when / how do we use Sidley in the
pre-NTIA proposal submission phase and in the post-NTIA submission phase?

Two factors which will impact that are (a) the scope as defined in our
initial engagement letter and (b) ICANN's approach to funding.

 

In any case, I suspect we all have a similar sentiment. Great quality of
work and necessary contribution but costs need to be managed as best as
possible.

 

Jonathan

 

From: Alan Greenberg [mailto:alan.greenberg at mcgill.ca] 
Sent: 26 June 2015 06:57
To: Gomes, Chuck; Seun Ojedeji; James Gannon
Cc: cwg-stewardship at icann.org
Subject: Re: [CWG-Stewardship] Legal cost reality

 

Actually Chuck, the Board motion was approval of the costs incurred through
31 March 2015, and Sidley Austin was only engaged on 6 March. So that
appears to be the charge for the first 3 weeks or so.

My recollection is that they are billing a bit under $1000 per hour, so that
would amount (in round numbers to 500 hours or 60 8-hour days in 25 calendar
days.

Our Sidley legal team consists of several people, and presumably for the
first week or so, many of them were "catching up", which presumably accounts
for a fair part of this. Then, Holly and Sharon were in Istanbul for several
days.

Overall, pretty high, but I am guessing the remaining months had a lower
per-month rate.

Alan

At 25/06/2015 05:55 PM, Gomes, Chuck wrote




Sean,

500k to date not per month.

Chuck


Sent via the Samsung GALAXY SR 5, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone


-------- Original message --------
From: Seun Ojedeji <seun.ojedeji at gmail.com> 
Date:06/25/2015 5:42 PM (GMT-05:00) 
To: James Gannon <james at cyberinvasion.net> 
Cc: cwg-stewardship at icann.org 
Subject: Re: [CWG-Stewardship] Legal cost reality 

With due respect James, I am in no way belittling the work of legal council.
I am rather wondering how we as a community recognising this huge cost did
not better strategize on how/when to engage external council. The amount
that has been spent on all participants of the ccwg and cwg(for
remote/physical meetings) would seem to be competing with the total cost of
legal advice (perhaps legal would even be more).

The deed has been done and we can't rewrite history. My comment is targeted
more on the fact that we need to think of how we engage legal more
efficiently going forward.

For the record, when Greg said top notch council are expensive, 500k monthly
is just beyond my imagination!

Regards

sent from Google nexus 4
kindly excuse brevity and typos.
On 25 Jun 2015 18:23, "James Gannon" <james at cyberinvasion.net > wrote:

Our legal advice has been critical to our process and Sidley have been
crucial to our successes.

I think we should be thanking them for their service, and yes top notch
legal services are not cheap.

It is most certainly something that I have no issue with the community
exercising its prudence over however lets not limit ourselves in any way to
engage with our counsel.

-James

From: < cwg-stewardship-bounces at icann.org
<mailto:cwg-stewardship-bounces at icann.org> > on behalf of Seun Ojedeji

Date: Thursday 25 June 2015 18:15

To: " cwg-stewardship at icann.org <mailto:cwg-stewardship at icann.org> "

Subject: [CWG-Stewardship] Legal cost reality

Hi,

I hope those who want to always push issues to external legal advice would
appreciate the need to be strategic and prudent about this. Over 500,000USD
already spent on Sidley is definitely not what we like ICANN to keep
spending it's resources on.

Regards

sent from Google nexus 4

kindly excuse brevity and typos.

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