Deep Attorney Fee Cuts, Judge Citing Billing Deficiencies
November 21, 2023
A recent Law 360 story by Dorothy Atkins, “’Alcon’s $1.2M Sanctions Fee Bid For Its MoFo Attys Slashed”, reports that a New York federal judge slashed Alcon Vision's $1.17 million fee request for its attorneys at Morrison Foerster LLP after securing sanctions against Lens.com over its bad faith counterclaims in a trademark dispute, instead awarding $227,000 after finding "glaring deficiencies" in the fee request. In a 20-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Nina Gershon rejected Alcon Vision LLC's seven-figure request for attorney fees due to the numerous deficiencies and lack of supporting documentation provided by its legal team at Morrison Foerster.
Instead, the judge reduced the fee request as proposed by Lens.com, and she gave the company and its counsel 60 days to pay the fee award. The sanctions award and fight over fees is the latest development in hotly contested intellectual property litigation that Texas-based Alcon, which was once owned by Novartis AG, kicked off in January 2018. Alcon accused Las Vegas-based rival Lens.com of selling its trademarked products without permission and with outdated packaging in New York.
Lens.com hit back with antitrust counterclaims in February 2019, claiming Alcon was attacking it just to "ingratiate itself" with eye care providers that would "reward" Alcon by prescribing their customers its lenses. But in July 2022, the judge slapped Lens.com Inc. and its attorneys with sanctions for filing bad faith counterclaims. The judge found that the website's counterclaims served no legitimate purpose and were filed to "harass, and cause delay, expense and vexation to Alcon." The judge ordered Lens.com and its counsel to pay Alcon's costs and attorney fees "caused by its bad faith and vexatious filing and maintaining" of its counterclaims, as well as fees arising from Lens.com's refusal to produce discovery.
The judge also called Lens.com's counterclaims in the dispute "problematic from the start," and ordered Alcon "to file an affidavit setting forth the costs and attorneys' fees for which I have found Lens.com and its counsel jointly and severally liable." In response, Alcon's lead counsel of Morrison Foerster filed a seven-page declaration seeking $1.17 million in attorney fees for approximately 1,700 hours of work on behalf of 14 attorneys, including partners and associates, and four paralegals.
But Lens.com fired back, arguing that the fee request is excessive, unsupported and doesn't include time records or invoices. Lens.com also argued that the declaration improperly seeks a single blended rate for its attorneys and an unidentified "standard hourly rate" for its paralegals, rather than the prevailing rate in the district, among other purported deficiencies. Lens.com argued that it shouldn't have to pay anything in fees due to the legally deficient fee bid, but at most, Alcon should only be entitled to $227,000 in fees.
Judge Gershon mostly sided with Lens.com on the matter. Her order noted that Morrison Foerster's declaration had "no supporting documentation and little detail" to support the fee calculation. She rejected Alcon's assumption in the declaration that it is entitled to recover fees that it already paid to Morrison Foerster in connection with the sanctioned conduct, regardless of whether those fees were reasonable. The judge concluded that ultimately Alcon's fee bid has "glaring deficiencies," including "vague" billing entries, and hundreds of hours of work invoiced in impermissible block billing, or lumping multiple distinct tasks into a single billing entry.
"Here, Alcon has not even attempted to justify, let alone sufficiently justified, as reasonable the hours or rates sought," the order says. Although the judge noted that she could deny the fee request in its entirety due to the declaration's lack of support, she declined to do so. However, she also refused to let Alcon submit additional support for its fee request, because the company didn't request permission to supplement the record, and it would require another round of briefing.
Instead, Judge Gershon agreed to adopt Lens.com's proposal to reduce the billable hours across the board by 62.4% and use a blended hourly rate of $355 for all attorneys and paralegals. "Lens.com's proposal is well within the range of percentage reductions other courts have applied to requested hours for similar fee application deficiencies," the judge wrote, citing a New York federal judge's decision to slash a fee request by 80% earlier this year in Williamsburg Climbing Gym Co. v. Ronit Realty LLC.