A recent Law 360 story by Christopher Cole, “NCAA Demands Billing Records in $45M Atty Fees Fight,” reports that the NCAA is fighting a push for almost $45 million in attorney fees by the legal team that scored a March antitrust victory against the organization in California federal court on behalf of student athletes, saying the players’ lawyers won’t disclose their billing records.  The two sides filed joint legal papers laying out their positions on paying the lawyers after they won a groundbreaking decision that limits the college sports organization from enforcing rules that cap compensation for student athletes.

While the players’ side has asked the court for a baseline figure of $29.9 million to cover their fees, plus a multiplier of 1.5 based on the outcome, the NCAA’s lawyers said there is no way to justify that amount without actually seeing figures on paper as to how much the opposing lawyers worked on the case.  So far, they said, the plaintiffs have been unwilling to share those records.

The damages phase of the litigation has already wrapped up, with attorneys for the student athletes already getting more than $44 million from a settlement, the NCAA said.  Now the organization says it is critical to find out how much time the plaintiffs' lawyers spent on winning the injunction on grant-in-aid rules, as opposed to time spent on the earlier damages part of the lawsuit.  “Ninth Circuit law is clear that the burden is on the prevailing party to support their request for attorneys’ fees with detailed billing records,” the NCAA said.  “Plaintiffs’ failure to provide [them] is grounds to reduce their fee award or dismiss their motion entirely.”

In deciding what to do with the dueling stances on attorney fees, the court will have to figure out how to pin a dollar figure to the key injunction that the student athletes won in March.  U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken in that 104-page order rejected the NCAA’s arguments that its compensation rules promote the demand for college sports and justify its antitrust violations.  She prohibited the association from enforcing rules that she considered “overly and unnecessarily restrictive.”

Following that major win, the players’ attorneys sought the compensation package of $29.9 million plus the multiplier for what they said was the economic value of the injunction, and submitted an economist’s declaration to bolster their argument.  But the NCAA said that wasn’t enough to show how much of the opposing legal team’s billable hours included in the requested total were actually spent on the injunction phase, and without the records, there is no way to tell for sure.  “Plaintiffs simply ask this court and defendants to take them at their word that all judgment calls have been made correctly, and seek to deny defendants the right to review and, where necessary, challenge the appropriateness of plaintiffs’ counsel’s assessments,” the NCAA said.

The players’ lawyers called the argument about the damages phase a “red herring” by the NCAA because they have already excluded time attributable to the damages portion of the case.  “Defendants never provided any compelling reason why [we] should be forced to turn over these voluminous records, which would require plaintiffs’ counsel to expend significant time and resources reviewing and redacting for attorney-client privilege and work product,” they said.