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Attorney Fees

Court: ‘No Way on Earth’ Should Lawyers Get Fee of $46K for $45 Error

Posted Mar 5, 2008 9:25 AM CST
By Debra Cassens Weiss

An off-duty police officer sought class action status for his lawsuit after he was shorted $45 in pay for crowd control, and following a settlement, his law firm sought $46,000 in attorney fees.

That’s not going to happen. “No way on earth,” says a California appeals court, which slashed the fees to $500, according to a story in the Recorder.

"At the risk of understatement," Justice Miriam Vogel wrote for the court, "there is no way on earth this case justified the hours purportedly billed” by lawyers at the Los Angeles law firm of Harris & Ruble.

The plaintiff, Michael Harrington, settled the case for $10,500 after a Los Angeles judge ruled that “neither the facts nor the law” support class action certification. The appeals court quoted the trial judge, William Fahey, who wrote that Harrington “has been paid a windfall of $10,500, which can and should be shared with his many attorneys."

Comments

1.

Jim
Mar 7, 2008 9:51 AM CST

Good.  Common sense prevails and is reported, for once.

2.

Court Got It Wrong - Again
Mar 7, 2008 10:24 AM CST

If defendant had done what it had agreed to do - pay money; the plaintiff would not have been forced to seek redress in the courts.  This is why fee shifting exists.  Why the courts are reluctant to enforce this is ridicules.  It is the only means for a “shallow pocket” plaintiff to compete with the “deep pocket” defendants.

Companies understand that most plaintiffs cannot afford to assert their rights, That is why they violate their agreements, because it is financially beneficial.  No executive ever gets fired because of a judgment.  They get fired because of poor financial performance.

Fee shifting is the only way to level the playing field.  Defendants control their own fate, abide by the law and their promises, or pay.

3.

Michael
Mar 7, 2008 11:39 AM CST

#2, you are so right. The whole point of fee shifting is that if it costs me more to hire a lawyer than I might receive from the action, then it’s rational for me to walk away from my rights. Fee shifting is almost always going to lead to lawyers getting paid more than the cause was worth—It’s the very case where the fee shifting was designed to operate!  If the legislature thinks that’s wrong (which it only does when it feels like it, and then only rarely), then what is the court doing stepping in an applying its own sense of whether the plaintiff’s rights were worth protecting?  Talk about activist judging…

Then again, fee shifting should only apply to reasonable fees—It seems a bit much to ask for $45k, although I don’t know the whole story obviously. I don’t think the plaintiff’s firm can simply sit on the fee shifting provision and throw all common sense out the window.  Maybe this was a test case designed to address many others—Maybe that justifies going to the wall on a single matter, I don’t know obviously.  Maybe the CA was offended at an overly greedy demand, and rather than finding a fair compromise decided to stick it to the greedy firm—I again don’t know obviously. I’d suggest that there’s probably more to this story than is being reported here.

4.

RHG
Mar 7, 2008 12:57 PM CST

#2 & #3:  You have no idea what you’re talking about.  This was a straight blackmail suit.  The issue was a clerical error made by the police union, which wasn’t even sued.  The police union gave the payroll company the wrong formula for calculating pay.  Once informed of the error, the company corrected it.  The police officer still went after the payroll company, not the union.  He made $10,000 on a $45 error by using the court system to blackmail a company that did nothing wrong.  The judge and court of appeal did the right thing by refusing to reward such behavior with an additional $40,000 of attorney’s fees.  The police union and the bar should publicly denounce their respective members for this blatant abuse of the legal system.

5.

khazeh
Mar 7, 2008 1:55 PM CST

So “loser pays” is OK when a defendant wins, but is blackmail and abuse of the system when a plaintiff wins?

6.

Charles McFarland
Mar 8, 2008 12:00 PM CST

The loser pays system can be abused, and that is why there are checks on a party’s recovery of fees. The work must be necessary, and the fees charged must be reasonable. Further, a party’s recovery of attorneys’ fees must bear some reasonable relationship to the amount in controversy. Otherwise, a party can use the sheer amount of its attorneys’ fees to extract a settlement in its favor, regardless of the merits of the case, based on the other side’s inability to pay the other side’s fees if it ultimately loses.

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