— A Ford Lemon Law lawsuit against Quill & Arrow LLP claims the Lemon Law lawyers have ripped off Ford regarding attorney's fees in thousands of Lemon Law cases in California.
Ford has been down this road before but came out on the legal losing end after the automaker sued California Lemon Law companies Knight Law Group, The Altman Law Group, and Wirtz Law APC.
Those companies were accused of racketeering and billing fraud concerning Lemon Law lawsuits going back to at least 2015.
Ford presented evidence to support its case, but the lawsuit was dismissed after the judge ruled Ford failed to plead the Lemon Law lawyers specifically worked together to overbill Ford.
California’s Lemon Law is called the Song-Beverly Consumer Warranty Act and provides consumers who purchase defective vehicles with the right to a repurchase of their vehicles if the manufacturer fails to repair the vehicles under their warranties after a reasonable number of repair attempts.
The Lemon Law allows a consumer to recover “the aggregate amount of costs and expenses, including attorney’s fees based on actual time expended, determined by the court to have been reasonably incurred by the buyer.”
But according to Ford:
"The policy animating the Lemon Law is the prompt, efficient resolution of legitimate warranty disputes in consumers’ favor—not the generation of attorney’s fees."
It its lawsuit against Quill & Arrow, Ford claims Quill conducted a "sweeping and systematic scheme" to defraud Ford in California Lemon Law lawsuits. And Ford contends Quill has filed numerous Lemon Law lawsuits without the consent or even knowledge of clients.
Quill allegedly fabricated its attorney billing records and deliberately blocked Ford’s ability to fulfill its warranty obligations to its own customers. Ford says California attorney rates of $350 to $950 per hour are normal, but Quill supposedly bills those rates only to pay a whole lot less to staff.
"In truth, Quill is not principally a law firm—it is a fraudulent and illegal billing factory, conceived and constructed to exploit the Lemon Law’s fee-shifting provisions by manufacturing tens of thousands of cases and billing Ford and other automakers at California attorney rates for work performed entirely by non-lawyers earning as little as $13 per hour." — Ford
The Lemon Law lawsuit also claims the billing records submitted to Ford and the courts are fabricated at California attorney rates of $350 to $950 per hour as Quill’s billing department allegedly takes the time entered by overseas virtual assistants when the work was really performed by domestic non-attorney staff.
Ford's Lemon Law lawsuit says the automaker reviewed a sample of 169 fee applications Quill has submitted to California courts which request a total of $4,450,536 in attorney’s fees. But Ford asserts not less than 50% has been billed to Ford as a result of Quill’s fraudulent and unlawful billing practice.
Ford further claims Quill falsely said work performed by non-lawyers was performed by Quill’s attorneys, to the tune of at least $25 million.
According to the lawsuit, since January 2021 Ford has paid Quill $101,222,668.94, with about half of that going for attorney's fees.
The Ford Lemon Law lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California: Ford Motor Company v. Quill & Arrow LLP.
Ford is represented by Kasowitz LLP.