Chapter 7 Bankruptcy – Trustee’s Fees

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Civil

7^th Circuit Court of Appeals

Officials: POSNER, EASTERBROOK, and SYKES, Circuit Judges

Chapter 7 Bankruptcy – Trustee’s Fees

No. 15-1150 Mohns, Inc. v. Bruce Lanser

Trustee fee of $28,030.33 fit within the bounds of bankruptcy statute and were not excessive.

“The trustee has no automatic entitlement to a fee based on the amount of time that he spends, for his fee is to be based on the “services” he renders in the bankruptcy proceeding and a “commission” is a payment for a specific service rather than being based, as in the case of a salary, on number of hours worked. See generally Alvarado v. Corporate Cleaning Services, Inc., 782 F.3d 365 (7th Cir. 2015). Even so, the amount of time a trustee works on a case is relevant to valuing his services. The trustee has estimated without contradiction that he and his staff (which presumably he had to compensate out of his own pocket) spent at least 200 hours working on the case—a reasonable amount of time given Mohns’s litigiousness—at an average hourly expense of $140.15 ($28,030.33 ÷ 200), which is not excessive.”

Affirmed.

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Attorney Derek A. Hawkins is the managing partner at Hawkins Law Offices LLC, where he heads up the firm’s startup law practice. He specializes in business formation, corporate governance, intellectual property protection, private equity and venture capital funding and mergers & acquisitions. Check out the website at www.hawkins-lawoffices.com or contact them at 262-737-8825.