A recent Bloomberg Law story by Bernie Pazanowski, “’Fitzpatrick Matrix Adopted for Setting DC Attorneys’ Fees Awards”, reports that a government employee in Washington, who settled a discrimination lawsuit against the federal agency for which she worked, is entitled to an award of $526,101 in attorneys’ fees, a federal court in Washington said.

The correct method for establishing prevailing market rates for attorneys’ fees in the Washington area is the Fitzpatrick Matrix, which lays out a “finely tuned rate schedule that lists a different market rate for each additional year of experience a lawyer brings instead of bundling experience levels into bands,” Judge James E. Boasberg of the US District Court for the District of Columbia said.

Cindy Brackett, who worked for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said that the court should use the Legal Services Index Matrix to compute the fees, which is a general schedule of hourly fees based on years of attorney experience.  But Boasberg rejected that method, saying that there were problems with the age of the data it used, with the sample of federal litigators it used, and the way it groups attorneys into just five experience bands.

• District precedent established that the Fitzpatrick Matrix was more reliable than the LSI Matrix because it’s limited to the Washington market, Boasberg said
• Fitzpatrick also employed lessons from an economics rather than a legal textbook to blend data from the cases he reviewed into a linear model that reflects common economic practice, he said
• Computing the rates here, Boasberg noted that both parties caused delays in the case that started in 2017 and said that using the 2022 version of the Fitzpatrick Matrix was proper
• The final award included fees for the time Brackett’s attorneys spent litigating the fee dispute