Maybe It's Cheaper To Bail 'Em Out
Lehman wasn't bailed out but that path may have been cheaper than cost of administering its bankruptcy. Health care and lawyering are the only two industries that don't have a learning curve which reduces costs as activity increases.
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 MORE than $263,000 for photocopies in four months. Over $2,100 in limousine rides by one partner in one month. And $48 just to leave a message. Explanations for these charges? Priceless.

The lawyers, accountants and restructuring experts overseeing the remains of Lehman Brothers have already racked up more than $730 million in fees and expenses, with no end in sight. Anyone wondering why total fees doled out in the Lehman bankruptcy alone could easily touch the $1 billion mark merely has to look at the bills buried among the blizzard of court documents filed in the case.

They’re a Baedeker to the continuing bankruptcy bonanza, a world where the meter is always running — sometimes literally: in the months after Lehman’s collapse in September 2008, the New York law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges paid one car-service company alone more than $500 a day as limo drivers cooled their heels waiting for meetings to break (and this in a city overflowing with taxis).

While most of corporate America may be just emerging from the Great Recession, bankruptcy specialists have spent the last two years enjoying an unprecedented boom. Ten of the 20 largest corporate bankruptcies in recent decades have occurred over the last three years, according to BankruptcyData.com, with Lehman snaring honors as the biggest corporate belly-flop in American history. More from The New York Times here.

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