Attorney fee disputes are usually tense, messy affairs that are best left to quality outside counsel — especially when the defendant ex-client has enough cash to afford his pick of trial lawyers for representation.

That's the situation Robin Harrison found himself in when he and his firm, Houston's Campbell, Harrison & Dagley, wanted to extract a multi-million dollar fee from Albert Hill III, a wealthy Dallas heir who the firm had previously represented in a trust dispute in a Northern District of Texas federal court.