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Attorneys Challenge Low Fee Award Before Ninth Circuit

February 21, 2017 | Posted in : Fee Award, Fee Calculation Method, Fee Dispute, Fee Issues on Appeal, Fee Request, Lodestar, Prevailing Party Issues

A recent Law 360 story by Dorothy Atkins, “Kraft Buyers’ ‘Greedy’ Attys Fight Low Fee Award at 9th Circ,” reports that attorneys who extracted a confidential settlement from Kraft Foods over mislabeling claims defended their $1.8 million fee request before the Ninth Circuit, saying the $11,000 award by a district judge who called them “greedy” didn’t come close to compensating them for hundreds of hours spent on the case.

Gregory S. Weston of The Weston Law Firm, who represented buyers of Kraft Foods Inc. snack products, argued that U.S. District Judge George H. Wu didn’t explain exactly how he determined that counsel was owed for only 200 hours of work, or how he arrived at the $11,000 figure.  Weston said the consumers prevailed in the case’s pleading stage, which he said involved three-years of litigating six different hearings and required much more than 200 hours of work.  “There’s no way that gets done in 200 hours,” he said.

Judge Wu rejected the $1.8 million fee request in June 2014, calling the consumers’ attorneys “greedy.”  At the time, the consumers had reached a confidential settlement with Kraft that ended the suit, which had been filed by lead plaintiffs Evangeline Red and Rachel Witt in 2010.  They alleged the company violated false advertising provisions of the Lanham Act by making misleading claims that several Kraft products were nutritious when they actually contained trans fats.

Weston said that state law requires courts to compile submitted hours carefully to determine attorneys’ fees, but that Judge Wu appeared to use an “arbitrary” and nonspecific method to determine the fees owed.  There’s also “no indication” Judge Wu actually reviewed counsel’s hours, or used an initial lodestar calculation or a negative multiplier to calculate the fees, he said.

But the three-judge panel pressed Weston on his argument, asking him why he believes he’s entitled to higher fees when it’s not apparent the consumers were the prevailing party in the case.  U.S. Circuit Judge Richard C. Tallman said that keeping the lawsuit alive for as long as the consumers did didn’t make them the prevailing party, especially, he said, when they basically lost on their theory of the case.

Weston disputed that view, arguing that the consumers, having won an injunction against Kraft, didn’t lose on their theory of the case at all.  Additionally, he said, even if the case’s merits didn’t go to trial, the consumers prevailed on six motions, including two motions to dismiss.  The only thing the consumers didn’t succeed at was achieving monetary relief for the class, he said.

And regardless, Weston said, case law has established that only awarding fees to parties who are successful on their theories would end up undercompensating attorneys, and it wouldn’t recognize the “inevitable exploratory nature of litigation.”

Meanwhile, Kraft attorney Dean N. Panos of Jenner & Block LLP said Judge Wu applied the correct, pragmatic approach to “trimming the fat” by broadly determining that the consumers’ “outrageous” fee request was too high and awarding a lower fee.  Panos argued that there’s no precise formula to calculate fees, and the court is not required to conduct an hour-by-hour analysis of time spent on a case.  Judge Wu had presided over three years of litigation and therefore he was in the best position to determine how much counsel should be paid, Panos said.

The case is Evangeline Red v. Kraft Foods Inc., case number 15-55760, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.