Kent Conrad: “The reality is, the Senator from Texas has said in this bill it provides for $92,000 an hour to counsel. That is not…”

“The reality is, the Senator from Texas has said in this bill it provides for $92,000 an hour to counsel. That is not true. You cannot find that on any page of this legislation. It is just not accurate. It is a fiction. It is made up out of whole cloth. The fact is, what is provided for is, where there is a disagreement between the parties, that an arbitration panel determine what are the appropriate fees based on a set of criteria that includes the level of effort that needed to be expended, the quality of the legal counsel's work, the amount of the investment that they have made. Frankly, $1,000 an hour is too much if somebody just went and copied the case from somewhere else and then filed it. But it is much too little in the case of those who invested millions of dollars in court preparation of their own resources without knowing whether they would be victorious or not. In that case, it is much too little. So the problem we have with this amendment is it is one-size-fits-all.”