A recent NLJ story, “Massachusetts Challenges Fee Award in a Case the Settled Pretrial” reports that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit heard oral arguments in Hutchison v. Patrick, a case concerning whether plaintiffs' lawyers should have been awarded $780,000 in attorney fees by the district court.  The state’s position is that a pretrial settlement of a class action means plaintiffs, people with brain injuries in nursing homes are not “prevailing parties”; thus the state doesn’t need to pay reimbursements for fees racked up by the plaintiffs, who sued over the state’s services.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr LLP and the Center for Public Representation filed a class action against the state in May 2007 for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act and other federal laws.  The parties began settlement talks that October and reached a final agreement in May 2008, which the district court approved in September 2008.  The settlement (pdf) calls for the state to expand certain home and community-based services for Massachusetts with brain injuries.  The agreement calls for the case to be dismissed “only after defendants have performed certain defined obligations and are in ‘substantial compliance’.  If the state fails to meet certain obligations, the agreement allows the plaintiffs to return to court.

Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Grace Miller argued that the legal concept of prevailing party has “a long-standing and specific legal meaning.”  In order to be entitled to fee reimbursement, prevailing parties “must obtain some form of judicial relief.”  Senior Judge Bruce Selya told Miller that, by that logic, most consent decrees would not result in prevailing party. “There’s got to be something more than the mechanics,” Selya said.  “You’ve got to look at this case in terms of the three characteristics that we say in Aranov would be necessary to confer prevailing party status.”

In Aranov v. Napolitano (pdf), a 2009 First Circuit ruling, laid out three factors for determining a prevailing party: first, whether the court order changes the parties’ legal relationship; second, whether there’s an appraisal of the merits of the order in question, such as a proposed class action settlement; and third, whether the parties are obligated to comply and whether there will be judicial oversight to enforce the obligation.

CLICK HERE to read the U.S. District Court’s Fee Ruling.