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Defense Lawyers Seek $25M in Fees in Circus Litigation

November 3, 2013 | Posted in : Defense Fees / Costs, Fee Award Factors, Fee Entitlement / Recoverability, Fee Reduction, Fee Request, Hourly Rates, Prevailing Party Issues

A recent BLT blog post, “Lawyers in Circus Litigation Seek $25M in Fees,” reports that lawyers for the producer of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus want the animal rights group that unsuccessfully sued the circus to pay more than $25 million in legal fees.  It’s been more than a decade since the animal rights group brought claims against Feld Entertainment Inc., accusing the circus of abusing its Asian elephants.  U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan entered a judgment against the animal rights group in 2009 and granted Feld’s request to recoup its legal fees in March.

In court filings, Feld said it was seeking fee for nearly 50,000 hours its lawyers spent working on the case from 2000 through March 2013.  Feld’s lead counsel at Norton Rose Fulbright, formerly Fulbright & Jaworski, reported billing more than 41,000 hours since late 2005 valued at $22.6 million.  Partner John Simpson, Feld’s lead attorney, said that the requested fees were appropriate given the complexity of the case and the number of years the parties had spent litigating.  “It’s lasted for 13 years, and is still ongoing,” he said.  “This is what it costs to defend something like that.”

Feld wants the plaintiffs and their former lead counsel Katherine Meyer of Meyer Glitzenstein & Crystal to pay the fees.  Meyer’s lawyer, Stephen Braga, a solo practitioner in Woodbridge, Va., said they would challenge Feld’s fee request.  “Everything about the fee petition seems to be over-the-top, from the overblown length of the pleadings, to its slanted description of the litigation, to the excessive number of hours worked and on the unprecedented amount of its total fee request,” Braga said in an email.

Beside Norton Rose Fulbright, three other law firms—Covington & Burling, Troutman Sanders, and Hughes Hubbard & Reed—worked on Feld’s defense.  For its work on the case from 2000 to 2006, Covington billed nearly 6,000 hours valued at $2.3 million.  Troutman billed approximately 1,300 hours valued at more than $273,000 for work in 2008 and 2009, and Hughes Hubbard billed 17.5 hours valued at around $11,700 for work in 2007 and 2008.

Feld argued in its fee request that the hourly rates claimed by its attorneys were in line with what other Washington law firms charged.  The rates for Fulbright lawyers ranged from an associate charging $340 per hour to Simpson’s $825 hourly rate.  Covington’s hourly rates ranged from $240 for a senior staff attorney to $915 for partner Eugene Gulland.

Fulbright and Covington both billed at discounted rates, according to Feld’s filings.  Fulbright discounted its hourly rates on average by 11.16 percent, and then made additional cuts averaging 3.93 percent.  The firm billed at the previous year’s rates—for work in 2013, for example, Simpson billed at his 2012 hourly rate of $825, as opposed to his current rate of $850.  Beginning in late 2004, Covington agreed to give Feld a 5 percent discount on all hourly rates.