Mari Henry Leigh

Mari Henry Leigh
Founder, CEO and Managing Member
mleigh@leigh-galese.com

1 (847) 595-1652 

Mari Henry Leigh is the Founder and Managing Member of Mari Henry Leigh & Associates, LLC. Mari and her legal team primarily concentrate their efforts in providing advice, counseling and litigation services to commercial, corporate, insurance and financial services clients which find themselves embroiled in direct party fee disputes, prevailing party fee-shifting litigation, independent counsel reimbursement disputes, disputes involving allegations of billing fraud or malfeasance and/or other legal cost recovery or allocation actions, including legal fees as damages.

Mari and her team also provide corporate clients with comprehensive litigation management and legal operations services, including the efficient execution and implementation of litigation strategies, the implementation of prospective cost containment and cost recovery/reimbursement initiatives (including ESI-discovery initiatives) and budgeting, predictive modeling and financial reporting on mass-tort, multi-jurisdictional litigation and other complex litigation. 

Referred to as the ‘‘Granddaddy of legal bill review’’ and ‘‘one of the first attorneys people go to [on billing and litigation management issues],’’ Mari is adept at data-analytics and has conducted hundreds legal audits involving over a billion dollars in legal costs over the course of her career, all backed by decades of litigation experience. In addition to serving as a testifying expert witness, Mari has also served as a mediator, facilitator, hearing officer and arbitrator of attorney fee disputes. In 2012, Mari served as special counsel for the United States before the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal in The Hague - assisting the US team with briefing and damage analysis. 

When not serving her clients, Mari likes to give back to the profession. She is a frequent author, speaker and instructor on issues involving reasonable attorneys’ fees, legal cost controls and litigation management, data analytics, attorney ethics, the attorney-client privilege and issues related to the defense of product liability claims. She is a co-author of a chapter entitled on “Budgeting and Controlling Legal Costs” in a multi-volume treatise entitled: “Successful Partnering Between Inside and Outside Counsel.” 

She is also the editor/author of a self-published handbook on the entitlement to, and selection of, independent counsel in insurance claims. She is or has been a member of several related professional organizations, including the Chicago Bar Association’s Professional Fees Committee Claims (past chair), the IADC and The Claims and Litigation Management Alliance (past Advisory Board member). 

Through 2019, Mari served as a Chancellor and a Faculty Member of The CLM’s Litigation Management Institute (LMI). The LMI is a certification program for attorneys and claims professionals and is designed to bridge the gap between legal theory and business and to certify candidates in the specific area of litigation management. Successful graduates earn the designation of Certified Litigation Management Professional (CLMP). Mari is also a member of the International Association of Defense Counsel (IADC) as well as a past member of the American Bar Association (ABA). 

Mari obtained her J.D. from Case Western University School of Law, where she graduated Order of The Coif, and obtained her B.A. in Communications from Purdue University.