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You Get What You Pay For (Or You Pay for What You Get!)

BY ALM Staff
June 22, 2004

A Manhattan Supreme Court justice has ordered a celebrity artist who tried to avoid almost $2 million in legal fees by claiming that his law firm's bills were unethically high to pay up. Justice Rolando T. Acosta said the big bills resulted from the client's own extravagance. Evidence demonstrated that artist Jeffrey L. Koons asked Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison to “leave no stone unturned” in litigating a custody dispute with his former wife. The judge wrote that Koons “is asking this court to make a policy determination that the amount incurred as a result of this litigation was unethical as a matter of law … This court, however, will not police the conduct of wealthy litigants who choose to share their wealth with counsel through extravagant litigation,” Justice Acosta concluded in Paul Weiss v. Koons, 602260/00.

The Case

Koons, whose stainless steel sculpture, “Rabbit,” remains one of the iconic works of the 1980s art scene, and whose sculpture of singer Michael Jackson and a chimpanzee sold for $5.6 million in 2001, hired Paul Weiss in 1993 to represent him in a bitter divorce from Ilona Staller, an Italian pornography star-turned-politician.

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