Legal Ethics: Reasonableness of fees

Nancy B. Rapoport | William S. Boyd School of Law

Nancy B. Rapoport is a UNLV Distinguished Professor, the Garman Turner Gordon Professor of Law at the William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and an Affiliate Professor of Business Law and Ethics in the Lee Business School at UNLV. After receiving her B.A., summa cum laude, from Rice University in 1982 and her J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1985, she clerked for the Honorable Joseph T. Sneed III on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and then practiced law (primarily bankruptcy law) with Morrison & Foerster in San Francisco from 1986-1991.

She started her academic career at The1 Ohio State University College of Law in 1991, and she moved from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor with tenure in 1995 to Associate Dean for Student Affairs (1996) and Professor (1998) (just as she left Ohio State to become Dean and Professor of Law at the University of Nebraska College of Law).

She served as Dean of the University of Nebraska College of Law from 1998-2000. She then served as Dean and Professor of Law at the University of Houston Law Center from July 2000-May 2006 and as Professor of Law from June 2006-June 2007, when she left to join the faculty at Boyd. She served as Interim Dean of Boyd from 2012-2013, as Senior Advisor to the President of UNLV from 2014-2015, as Acting Executive Vice President & Provost from 2015-2016, as Acting Senior Vice President for Finance and Business (for July and August 2017), and as Special Counsel to the President from May 2016-June 2018. In 2022, UNLV’s Alumni Association named her the Outstanding Faculty Member of the Year.

Her specialties are bankruptcy ethics, ethics in governance, law firm behavior, and the depiction of lawyers in popular culture. Among her published works are CORPORATE SCANDALS AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS 3D (Nancy B. Rapoport and Jeffery D. Van Niel, eds. West Academic 2018), which addresses the question of why we never seem to learn from prior corporate scandals, LAW SCHOOL SURVIVAL MANUAL: FROM LSAT TO BAR EXAM, co-authored with Jeffrey D. Van Niel (Aspen Publishers 2010), and LAW FIRM JOB SURVIVAL MANUAL: FROM FIRST INTERVIEW TO PARTNERSHIP, also co-authored with Jeffrey D. Van Niel (Wolters Kluwer 2014). She is admitted to the bars of the states of California, Ohio, Nebraska, Texas, and Nevada and of the United States Supreme Court. In 2001, she was elected to membership in the American Law Institute, and in 2002, she received a Distinguished Alumna Award from Rice University.

In 2017, she was inducted into Phi Kappa Phi (Chapter 100). She has served as the Secretary of the Board of Directors of the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement (the Mob Museum) and currently serves as a Trustee of Claremont Graduate University. She is also a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and a Fellow of the American College of Bankruptcy. In 2009, the Association of Media and Entertainment Counsel presented her with the Public Service Counsel Award at the 4th Annual Counsel of the Year Awards.

In 2017, she received the Commercial Law League of America’s Lawrence P. King Award for Excellence in Bankruptcy, and in 2018, she was one of the recipients of the NAACP Legacy Builder Awards (Las Vegas Branch #1111). She has served as the fee examiner or as chair of the fee review committee in such large bankruptcy cases as Zetta Jet, Toys R Us, Caesars, Station Casinos, Pilgrim’s Pride, and Mirant.

Joseph R. Tiano | Legal Decoder

Joseph R. Tiano Jr., Esq. is Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Legal Decoder. After practicing law for nearly 20 years, Joe founded Legal Decoder because he saw that clients lacked the analytic tools and data to effectively price and manage the cost of legal services delivered by outside counsel. Joe set out to build an intelligent, data driven technology company that would revolutionize the way that legal services from outside counsel are priced and economically evaluated.

Previously, Joe was a Partner at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, LLP and Thelen LLP where he grew and managed all aspects of a multi-million-dollar cross-border finance practice. Entrepreneurship runs through Joe’s veins since his early days as a venture capital lawyer representing transformative technology companies, like Blackboard Inc., and many of the outgrowths of Blackboard (WeddingWire, Presidium, Starfish Retention Solutions and others). Joe has been a prolific writer publishing numerous articles on substantive legal issues and the legal industry in general.

Joe graduated from Georgetown University in 1992 with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Business Administration and received his J.D. from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law in 1995. Joe lives in Scottsdale, Arizona with his wife, Meredith, and their two boys, Gabriel and John-Paul.

During the rare moments when he is not working, Joe can be found taking his sons on hikes, watching their extracurricular activities and helping Meredith implement her design creations.

I. Rule 1.5: Reasonableness of fees | 3:30pm – 3:50pm

II. Early-warning signs of problems with a lawyer’s behavior | 3:50pm – 4:10pm

III. How artificial intelligence facilitates billing reasonably in certain processes | 4:10pm – 4:30pm