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Boston Federal Judge Slashes Plaintiffs' Fee Request in Wine Shipment Case

June 15, 2011 | Posted in : Billing Practices, Expenses / Costs, Fee Award, Fee Reduction, Fee Request, Hourly Rates, Litigation Management, Lodestar

A recent NLJ story, “Boston Federal Judge Awards Nearly $680K in Fees to Wine Association” reports that a Boston federal judge has awarded a wine association close to $680,000 in attorney fees and expenses after it won a nearly five-year fight against a Massachusetts state agency over a state wine shipment law.  Judge Rya Zobel’s ruling in Family Winemakers of California v. Jenkins (pdf) awarded $615,873 in fees and $62,561 in expenses to the plaintiffs, victors in a challenge to the Massachusetts statute, which banned large wineries from directly shipping to the state’s consumers.  Kirkland & Ellis of Chicago and Boston-based Rubin & Rudman represented the wine association and two individual plaintiffs.

In the ruling, Zobel wrote that plaintiffs’ fee requests for several types of work were excessive.  “Counsel…spent an unreasonable amount of time on various phases of the litigation,” she wrote.  Zobel concluded that the plaintiffs sought unreasonable reimbursement for four different types of work, including lawyer conferencing time, work on the summary judgment motion, preparing for the 1st Circuit oral argument and preparing the fee motion.  Those four categories counted for 2,247.96 of the 4,058.5 claimed hours, Zobel wrote.  She deemed that 1,179.48 hours -- 52% -- was reasonable for those categories of the work.

The judge cut the rest of the plaintiffs’ requested billable hours by 24% to account for what she considered unreasonable billing, such as paralegal time spent on clerical tasks.  She ultimately awarded the plaintiffs 2,555.49 of their requested billable hours.  In her analysis of the billable rates, Zobel wrote that the $559.58 hourly rate for the lead plaintiffs’ lawyer, Tracy Genesen, a San Francisco Kirkland & Ellis partner “is not unreasonable given her particular expertise in the area of wine law.”

Still, Zobel cut her blended rate by 10% to $503.62 because “the use of her 2010 rate for all billed hours…creates a windfall for plaintiffs, as it far exceeds the rate at which the majority of her work was invoiced to the client.”  “I reduced her blended rate by 10% so that she is compensated fairly, but not excessively, for the delay in payment,” Zobel wrote.  Nor did she allow $6,832.08 in overtime and meal costs, and she trimmed $33,997.85 in postage, telephone, and document related cost requests by 25% due to “unnecessary use of messenger and overnight mailing.” The judge declined the plaintiffs’ request for travel expenses because they were not itemized.