NEW YORK (Bloomberg) - Alvarez & Marsal LLC, the liquidator of bankrupt Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., has collected $262.2 million in fees over 18 months, topping a quarter-billion dollars for its work, according to a regulatory filing.

The restructuring firm, which provided Lehman with its current chief executive officer, Bryan Marsal, is billing the bankruptcy estate for "interim management", according to today's filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The defunct investment bank has paid all of its lawyers and advisers $731.6 million through March 31, it said in the filing.

Lehman, which before it failed used accounting methods that concealed billions of dollars of risks, according to an examiner's report, is liquidating to pay creditors. Its payments to managers and advisers have not faced major objections such as those in the case of bankrupt automaker Chrysler LLC, which used US Treasury loans to wind itself down.

"The way the system's supposed to work is creditors stand up and object to the fees, which essentially come out of their payments," said Robert Lawless, a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law in Champaign who tracks fees. "They don't throw good money after bad because at best they can only increase their payout a little."

Dennis Dunne, a lawyer for the Lehman creditors' committee, did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment. His firm, Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy LLP, got $47.7 million through March 31 for advising the committee.

"What a travesty," said George Fisher, Capital Guardian LLC's head of municipal trading. "They've taken nearly three- quarters of a billion dollars out of a company that's bankrupt, and nobody cares."

Mr. Marsal said his firm's bills are driven by "the sheer size and complexity" of the case, with much of the cost coming from handling Lehman's illiquid assets such as real estate. The real cost of administering those assets is less than six-tenths of 1 percent, he said in an e-mail yesterday.

"Overall, this has been a very efficiently administered Chapter 11 case," he said. About 150 Alvarez & Marsal employees are working full time at Lehman, according to Kimberly Macleod, a spokeswoman for Lehman.

As part of a five-year plan to run Lehman's least saleable assets, Marsal created a unit called Lamco, which will provide longer-term jobs for 70 employees of Alvarez & Marsal, co-headed by Marsal, as well as for 385 Lehman workers, according to court filings.

That would give it twice as many workers as the company entrusted with running the bankruptcy.

The defunct investment bank also disclosed fees paid to the law firms mounting suits against Barclays plc., scheduled to go on trial on April 26 in US Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan over Lehman's allegation that it made an $11 billion "windfall" on its 2008 purchase of the North American Lehman brokerage.

Jones Day, Lehman's special counsel for US and Asian litigation, made $20.5 million through March 31. Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges LLP, special counsel to the creditors' committee, made $6 million, according to the filing.

Jenner & Block LLP, the law firm headed by Lehman examiner Anton Valukas, earned $48.4 million for more than a year's work producing a 2,200-page report on the bankruptcy that was the subject of a hearing in Washington this week about flaws in regulation of banks.