A recent Texas Lawyer story, “Why Judges Deny or Cut Attorney Fees,” reports that when U.S. Judge Sam Sparks awarded Jerad Najvar’s clients $137,074 in attorney fees—only slightly more than half of the $236,544 they had requested—the Houston lawyer took it in stride. “Judges have a lot of leeway,” Najvar said about the fee award.
Fee-seeking lawyers spend countless hours head-scratching about how to maximize fee awards given such judicial “leeway.” A recent sampling of Texas federal courts' fee rulings shows that even when a legal team wins a $300 million final judgment for a client, the judge can slash a fee request by more than half.
When Roy Hardin’s client requested a fee award from an East Texas federal court, it also faced opposition from a defendant. Hardin represents Retractable Industries (RTI), which won an $11.2 million fee award on Jan. 15 by U.S. District Judge Leonard Davis of the Eastern District of Texas in Marshall. Hardin, a partner in Dallas’ Locke Lord, led a team that secured a $113 million jury verdict for RTI.
On Jan. 15, Davis issued the fee award as well as a $340 million final judgment, based on the jury verdict and additional awards allowed under the antitrust laws. However, in an earlier ruling, Davis had rejected an initial $36 million fee request made by RTI. His team used Davis’ order denying the $36 million proposed fees as a road map for recalculating a new fee request, Hardin said. “We redacted and redacted and came up with a number,” Hardin said.
In another case, U.S. District Frank Montalvo for the Western District of Texas in El Paso issued a 21-page ruling with copious details about why he had reduced by more than half the $2,775 in fees sought by Francisco Ortega’s corporate client. Ortega’s client had requested the fee award for work that Ortega, as a shareholder in El Paso’s Scott Hulse, had done related to its motion to compel discovery. Notably, Montalvo had asked Ortaga’s client to submit the pretrial fee request for his work on the motion.
In his ruling, Montalvo noted that Ortega “affirms under penalty of perjury that he spent approximately 11.10 hours performing activities” on his motion and related documents at an hourly rate of $250. Montalvo, however, concluded that Ortega worked only five hours on those tasks and could only charge $200 an hour, for a total of a $1,000 fee award.
Montalvo provided what he calls “a line-by-line analysis” of Ortega’s invoice. The judge deemed 0.30 hours spent on communications about unanswered discovery requests and 0.40 hours reviewing answers to interrogatories to be excessive. Both of those tasks should have consumed half the amount of time requested, the judge concluded. As to the time Ortega spent researching drafting and finalizing his motion to compel, the judge expressed skepticism. He noted that the Scott Hulse shareholder has practiced for seven years. Given the “simplicity” of the legal standards for the work, and Ortega’s “caliber” as an attorney, the judge concluded, the creation of the seven-page document couldn’t have taken Ortega long to produce.