In a blistering federal complaint filed in Los Angeles, Ford Motor Co. has accused a group of California law firms of orchestrating a years-long overbilling scheme so brazen, it reads like satire — including a jaw-dropping claim that one attorney managed to squeeze 57.5 billable hours into a single 24-hour day.
The automaker’s filing takes aim at nine defendants, with the Knight Law Group named as the ringleader of what Ford called a “magical mystery tour” of falsified time sheets, legal padding, and inflated invoices. According to Ford, the alleged misconduct spanned thousands of Lemon Law cases — not just against Ford, but against multiple carmakers — executed carefully enough to avoid scrutiny by flying under the radar of individual dockets.
Ford alleges it bled at least $100 million due to this alleged legal legerdemain and is now seeking triple that amount — $300 million — under the federal RICO statute, a legal tool typically used to take down organized crime.
Among the eyebrow-raising examples in the complaint: a Knight Law partner is said to have billed nearly 13 hours on document requests alone — just a portion of her alleged 57.5-hour day on November 30, 2016. Another lawyer purportedly logged 29 hours in one day attending two separate trials held nearly 400 miles apart — one in Los Angeles, the other near San Francisco — defying the limits of both time and geography.
Ford claims that Knight Law routinely brought in a legal cavalry of up to 15 attorneys per case, an overstaffing tactic that supercharged billable hours under California’s Lemon Law, which allows lawyers to recoup “reasonable” fees for helping consumers with defective vehicles.
The lawsuit, Ford Motor Co. v. Knight Law Group LLP et al, now sits before the U.S. District Court in California’s Central District. As of now, the firms named in the suit have not responded to the allegations.
