I Work for a Court-Appointed Attorney. The Invoice Process is a Joke.
I’m a legal assistant for a court-appointed criminal defense attorney in Wayne County. I manage case files, coordinate hearings, track discovery, keep communications moving, and prepare the invoices. I see exactly how much time, energy, and care goes into defending people who often have no one else in their corner.
And I also see how hard the system makes it to get paid for doing that work.
Let me be blunt: the way Detroit and Wayne County handle court-appointed billing is a disorganized, disrespectful mess. It’s slow, inconsistent, and run by people who don’t understand legal defense but still feel qualified to judge what it “should” take to do the job.
Basic Casework = Red Flag?
We submit invoices with normal, necessary entries:
File review before court
Going through discovery again as new materials come in
Preparing for trial
Following up with the client after a new issue comes up
And what do we get?
“Duplicative.”
“Explain how this review is different from the previous one.”
“Excessive—why is the file being reviewed again?”
“Too much time—be specific about what you were reviewing.”
Let’s get something straight: real casework doesn’t happen in one pass. This isn’t a job where you look at a file once and never go back. Attorneys revisit material. They dig deeper. They re-prepare based on what’s changed—because that’s what good defense requires.
And when you penalize attorneys for that, what you’re really doing is encouraging them to be less prepared.
The Real Issue: Protecting Attorney-Client Privilege, Not Strategy
When they ask us for specific details about file review or discovery—exactly which documents were reviewed, what parts of the case the attorney focused on—they’re not just scrutinizing time spent.
They’re forcing us into a corner where we risk breaking attorney-client privilege.
This isn’t about revealing defense strategy. It’s about maintaining the confidential relationship between attorney and client.
Invoices should never require us to disclose privileged information or anything that could compromise client confidentiality just to get paid.
But these demands push us dangerously close to crossing that line.
We have to balance being detailed enough to satisfy reviewers while not revealing anything protected by attorney-client privilege. And that balance is impossible to achieve under this system.
That’s the real problem—and it needs to be fixed.
It’s June 2025. We’re Still Waiting on Invoices from March.
To make this all even more ridiculous, it’s June 2025, and we still have invoices from March 2024 that haven’t been paid.
That’s over a year of silence. Over a year of waiting for payment on work that’s already done. And this isn’t a one-off situation—it’s becoming the norm.
The county has no problem expecting attorneys to keep taking cases, showing up to court, prepping like professionals—but then they drag their feet when it’s time to pay them.
How is that fair? How is that sustainable?
This System Pushes Good People Out
Attorneys are leaving court-appointed work—not because they don’t care, but because the system is set up to burn them out. Every delay, every rejected invoice, every request for “more specifics” chips away at the time and energy they could be spending on clients.
And the people who suffer? The clients. The people this system is supposed to protect.
You can’t demand top-tier legal work and then question every minute spent on doing that work. You can’t punish attorneys for being thorough and then act shocked when the quality of defense suffers.
The Reviewers Have No Legal Experience — Or At Least It Sure Doesn’t Seem That Way
Honestly, I don’t believe most of the people reviewing these invoices have any legal background. If they did, they wouldn’t be asking for clarification of basic legal terms in the invoices.
If you’ve never sifted through messy discovery, sat across from a client, or prepped for a court appearance/hearing with a file full of contradictions—you don’t get to decide what’s “too much.”
This is real work, with real consequences. And it deserves to be respected.
If the courts want court-appointed attorneys to keep showing up, prepared and professional, then it’s time the system started treating them like professionals. That means timely payment. That means trusting their judgment. And most of all, that means stopping the kind of invoice reviews that push us right up against ethical and legal boundaries.
If you're more worried about what got billed than how the case was handled, then maybe you’re missing the point entirely.
And let’s not even get me started on how long it takes to get paid…
When the county switched to this new billing system, the attorneys were told it would take up to 6 weeks to be paid—well, it can take up to 6 weeks just to get an invoice approved, and if it’s rejected, that drags out the process even longer. Then, after approval, it’s another 6 weeks to actually receive payment.
Talk about timely and fair to the attorney—especially when it’s already a fight just to get invoices approved.
