A recent Law 360 story by Max Jaeger, “Sanctioned NFL Player Must Cover Atty Fees in Poaching Suit” reports that New York Giants wide receiver Kenny Golladay must cover more than $15,000 in attorney fees for his former agency after flouting a subpoena in litigation over whether he was poached by a rival, a Michigan judge said.  In an order, U.S. Magistrate Judge Anthony P. Patti overruled Golladay and approved $14,929 in attorney fees to cover Honigman LLP's representation of the wideout's former agents at Clarity Sports International LLC.  The judge refused to award fees for work by Dowd Bennett LLP, finding them "excessive and redundant" of work by Honigman's lawyers.

Clarity said it cost them a little over $20,000 to get Golladay to comply with a third-party subpoena for his deposition and document production.  The agency says in a separate suit that sports memorabilia sellers helped non-party Creative Arts Agency steal Golladay from them.  The wide receiver is not a party to that suit, but he ignored a 2020 subpoena, so Clarity sued to compel.  The court hit him with sanctions for his "cavalier and reckless attitude" and ordered him to pay Clarity's legal bills for giving them the "run-around."

Golladay opposed most of the Honigman fees, arguing that partner Jeff Lamb's four hours at $580 per hour merely duplicated 19.75 hours of work that partner Andrew Clark did at $455 per hour.  But the court disagreed.  "Although much of attorney Lamb's relevant work appears to have involved review and conference with other attorneys, the court considers such collaboration between partners and associates typical and substantive, as opposed to duplicative and redundant," Judge Patti wrote.

That was "especially true" given Clark was out on leave for two months, the judge said.  He also approved 11 hours that associate Nicholas Burandt contributed at $350 an hour.  Some work was duplicative, however, and the judge denied $5,400 to Dowd Bennett for the roughly 7.5 hours each contributed by Dowd Bennett partner John D. Comerford and associate James B. Martin, who charged $420 an hour and $300 an hour respectively.

Golladay argued he shouldn't have to pay their fees because Clarity retained them on a contingency basis in the underlying tortious interference case against CAA that's separately playing out in Pennsylvania federal court.  Because it is ongoing, Clarity had not "incurred" any fees yet, he argued.  "The court, however, struggles to find the logic in this latter argument, as it would imply that parties (or non-parties) would be shielded from sanctions for poor behavior whenever the opposing side has a contingency-fee relationship," Judge Patti said in his order.

Instead, the judge said Dowd Bennett LLP's contribution amounted to sending emails to Honigman counsel and editing filings, and awarding fees would be excessive.  "Although Respondent's behavior throughout this matter has undoubtedly been unacceptable and necessitated additional work by Petitioners, that work was frustrating more so than complicated," Judge Patti said.

A recent Law 360 story by Craig Clough, “Attys in Historic $508M Title VII Win Want Bigger Lodestar” reports that attorneys representing a class of 1,100 women in a long-running lawsuit against Voice of America asked a D.C federal judge to grant them a lodestar enhancement, arguing the extraordinary legal work that spanned four decades and resulted in a record $508 million settlement calls for such a boost.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta previously blocked the attorneys' bid for an additional $34 million in fees that would have brought their total award to $75 million.  Since that 2020 ruling, the parties have reached a deal on a $19 million lodestar fee award, but the class attorneys asked the court to grant an enhancement up to 4.5 times that amount.

The extraordinary if not unprecedented circumstances of the lawsuit and the record-breaking settlement amount for a case brought under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act supports the enhancement, class attorneys at Steptoe & Johnson LLP said in the motion.  Steptoe & Johnson is one of many firms that represent the class.

"If ever such a case for enhancement was presented, it is this one where, through superior lawyering and incredible determination, counsel was able to achieve — by far — the largest class-wide recovery and largest individual class member recoveries for employment discrimination in the history of the Civil Rights Act," the class attorneys said.

A group of journalists in 1977 sued Voice of America and its former parent agency, the U.S. Information Agency, in a case that eventually covered discrimination claims between 1974 and 1984 and more than 1,000 plaintiffs.  The government disputed the accusations for more than 20 years ahead of the 2000 settlement.

Bruce Fredrickson of Webster & Fredrickson PLLC led the representation of the class for more than four decades. The lodestar motion said he was assigned to the case as a young associate at Hudson Leftwich & Davenport fresh out of law school, and he has remained on the case ever since. He drafted the initial complaint for lead plaintiff Carolee Brady Hartman and first motion to certify the class before losing at trial in1979, according to the motion.  When Hudson Leftwich declined to take up the appeal, Fredrickson represented the women in his spare time until he formed his own firm in 1982.  He eventually reversed the trial outcome on appeal, according to the motion.

"Hartman went on to become the most successful employment discrimination case in history," the class attorneys said in the motion.  "While ultimately requiring additional lawyers engaged in decades of hard work and the resources of additional firms to achieve this result, it was Mr. Fredrickson, with his commitment to excellence, his brilliant strategic decisions, his tenacity in facing off against the best-financed defendant that obstinately refused to accept the judgment of liability, and his sheer perseverance that made this extraordinary success possible."

The class attorneys cited several U.S. Supreme Court cases on lodestar enhancement, including 2010's Perdue v. Kenny A. and 1984's Blum v. Stenson, which said rare and exceptional legal representation can support an enhancement.  "After decades of hard-fought litigation and unsurpassed results, it is clear that this is the rare and exceptional case which unambiguous Supreme Court precedent firmly establishes as appropriate to compensate plaintiffs' counsel for superior lawyering by awarding an enhancement above their lodestar fees," the class attorneys said.  The motion concluded with the class attorneys saying, "The greatest result in the history of Title VII deserves nothing less."

A recent Reuters story by David Thomas, “Ex-Client Wans $22 mln From Brown Rudnick, Saying Lawyers Overbilled” reports that an Austrian multinational construction company went on the offensive in a fee dispute with U.S. law firm Brown Rudnick, claiming the firm routinely overbilled it and demanding $22 million.  Brown Rudnick sued Christof Industries Global GmbH in September, alleging the industrial plant builder owed $8 million in attorney fees and interest from an international arbitration over a failed construction project.

But the law firm racked up more than $6 million in fees after promising in writing to not exceed a $2 million fee estimate, Christof alleged in its countersuit, filed in Boston federal court.  The law firm improperly overbilled, Christof alleged, saying one attorney billed more than $145,000 for 231 hours preparing to examine one witness.  The law firm billed more than 40 hours for assembling binders, the company said.

"In a number of time entries that verge on satire, Brown Rudnick attorneys even billed for drafting and corresponding about a proposal for their 'binder compilation strategy,'" Christof said in its suit.

The dispute stems from Brown Rudnick's work arbitrating a conflict arising from a Christof subsidiary's work as a contractor during the construction of a fiberboard production plant in South Carolina.  Christof said it signed an agreement with the firm so that its legal costs would not exceed $40,000 a month, plus a $200,000 retainer up front.  But it said Brown Rudnick billed more than $250,000, not including the retainer, just in its first month.

A panel awarded Christof more than $24.5 million in damages in the underlying arbitration, which was offset by about $20 million in advanced contract payments the company had received.  The final award was for $6.68 million.

A recent Law 360 story by Khorri Atkinson, “2nd Circ. Repeals Finding $40K Atty Fee Resulted in ‘Windfall’,” reports that the Second Circuit vacated a district court ruling that halved a law firm's attorney fee request in a Social Security disability case, saying the amount in question does not constitute a "windfall" because it was well-earned.  A three-judge panel criticized U.S. Magistrate Judge Stewart D. Aaron's September 2020 finding that the $40,170 fee Binder & Binder LLP requested for work performed on a contingent basis was "unreasonable," and it vacated the reduced award of $19,350 the judge had said adequately compensates the firm.

Judge Aaron had taken issue with the firm's de facto hourly rate of $1,556.98 charged for its work in securing $160,680 in past-due disability benefits for a client.  But U.S. Circuit Judge Guido Calabresi, who authored the opinion, said the magistrate failed to consider several relevant factors that show the request fee is not a windfall.

"Rather, it is the product of efficient and effective representation, which drew upon Binder & Binder's substantial experience and expertise and was informed by the firm's representation of [the client] … through years of agency proceedings," the opinion said.  "And while a de facto hourly rate that is starkly out of line with de facto hourly rates in other social security cases may suggest a windfall, the rate here is not such an outlier."  In determining if there is a windfall, courts should consider the expertise of lawyers and examine whether they could accomplish in a relatively short amount of time what less specialized or less well-trained attorneys might take far longer to do, the panel reasoned.

In this case, Judge Calabresi said, "There is no doubt that Binder & Binder's specialization and expertise enabled them to operate especially efficiently."  The judge noted in part that the lawyers spent several hours working on the case at the federal level, drafted and reviewed highly detailed court papers, and successfully negotiated a stipulated remand with the government lawyers.

"Binder & Binder's ability and expertise allowed it to accomplish in just 25.8 hours what other lawyers might reasonably have taken twice as much time to do," the opinion said.  "And the relatively high de facto hourly rate of $1,556.98 must be viewed in this context   It would be foolish to punish a firm for its efficiency and thereby encourage inefficiency."  Another factor that should be taken into consideration is the nature and length of the professional relationship with the claimant, including any representation at the agency level, the opinion added.

A recent Law 360 story by Mike Curley, “Atty Fees Capped at 15% in $26B Opioid MDL Settlement”, reports that an Ohio federal judge has capped contingent attorney fees in a $26 billion settlement in the sprawling opioid multidistrict litigation at 15%, saying the cap is necessary to ensure more money goes to the plaintiffs for addressing the harm opioids have done and to keep fees from being unreasonable.  U.S. District Judge Dan Aaron Polster capped the fees for individually retained plaintiff's attorneys, or IRPAs, in the suit, including both those whose cases are already in the MDL and those who opt-in to the settlement without having participated up to now.

According to the order, the $26 billion settlement reached in July already sets aside $2.3 billion, or about 8.8%, of its fund for attorney fees, and all the attorneys in the plaintiffs executive committee have agreed to waive their contingency contracts to take their fees from that fee fund.  In addition, the deal stipulates that in no event must less than 85% of the funds be spent on opioid remediation, the judge wrote, so the hard cap is already built into the settlement.  In order to collect from the attorney fee fund, IRPAs must submit an application and waive the right to enforce their own contingent fee contracts, the judge wrote.  And even if they forgo payment from the attorney fee fund, the amount they can collect on their contingent contracts is still capped at 15%, the judge wrote.

The deal with J&J, AmerisourceBergen Corp., Cardinal Health Inc. and McKesson Corp. ends the bulk of the suits levied over the opioid crisis. Up to $5 billion will come from J&J over the next nine years and $21 billion from the distributors over the next 18 years, with up to $23.5 billion of the total going toward easing the opioid epidemic, according to the deal.  Under the terms of the deal, J&J agreed to stop its opioid sales, according to a statement from the New York Attorney General's Office.  The drug distributors also agreed to share data about opioid shipments with an independent monitor.  New York was joined by the state attorneys general for California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas in negotiating the deal.

The 15% cap represents a consensus following significant deliberation and negotiations among the parties, Judge Polster wrote Friday, and the fact that attorneys must waive their contingent contracts to collect from the fee fund will prevent the plaintiff entities from having to effectively pay their attorneys twice, and keep the amount each attorney receives fair and equitable.  Given the scale of the settlement, which Judge Polster said was among the largest in the nation's history, the lower percentage will keep the fees from growing beyond what is reasonable, adding that a disproportionately large fee could erode faith in the legal system.

Finally, the judge noted that some attorneys may well have performed extraordinary work on behalf of their clients far beyond the norm in the opioid MDL, and in those rare cases, the court will allow an IRPA who forgoes the fee fund to enforce a fee contract at higher than 15%, provided they present evidence of the exceptional work and extraordinary risk they went through in the case.  "We understand the court was faced with a difficult situation here and reached a Solomonic decision to ensure fairness for all the government clients," Hunter Shkolnik of Napoli Shkolnik PLLC, representing plaintiffs in the MDL, told Law360.

Paul Geller of Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP, also representing plaintiffs in the MDL, said those who worked the hardest on the case are the ones that are going to be alright with the cap.  "If there ever were a case where a lawyer should agree with a well-reasoned fee cap, it's this one," he said.  "There are literally hundreds of lawyers involved in opioid litigation ranging from altruistic to avaricious, and everything in between; one's reaction will largely depend on where you fall on that continuum."  Geller added that the litigation to him has always "had a higher purpose" of addressing the public health crisis

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