A recent BLT Blog post, “Heller Attorney Awarded $1.1M in Fees, One-Third of Their Request” reports that after 3 years of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in District of Columbia v. Heller and a length fight with the District of Columbia, the attorneys for Dick Heller have been awarded their attorney fees.  In a ruling, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington awarded Heller’s attorneys, led by Alan Gura of Alexandria, Va.’s Gura & Possessky, just over $1.1 million – about one-third of what they had requested.

Gura and his team had requested about $3.1 million in attorney fees.  By contrast, the District of Columbia had argued that Heller’s attorneys merited just over $840,000.  Sullivan said determining the lawyers’ hourly rate alone was difficult, as three of the six attorneys on the case – Clark Neily III of the Institute for Justice, and Robert Levy and Gene Healy with the Cato Institute – work for nonprofit groups.  And the other three, including Gura, Laura Possessky and Thomas Huff, do not have standard fixed hourly rates, in part because they charge lower rates to clients who otherwise couldn’t afford them.

Both side argued to Sullivan that various matrixes and formulas should be used to determine the correct hourly rate.  The plaintiffs’ team concluded that the rates should be $589 per hour for all the attorneys except Huff, who had less experience.  They argued Huff should be compensated $361 per hour.  Sullivan called those rates “extraordinary” and not appropriate for this case. “[T]he Court is unwilling to award the high rates requested by plaintiff absent specific evidence that those are, indeed, the prevailing market rates for attorneys engaged in complex federal litigation outside the District of Columbia’s largest law firms,” Sullivan wrote.

In a joint statement said they “respectfully” disagreed with Sullivan’s determination of the hourly rates calculated in this case, which they submitted was based on an outdated U.S. Attorney’s Office Fee Matrix.  “As has become increasing apparent in recent years, that matrix bears little if any relationship to prevailing hourly rates for complex litigation in the Washington, D.C. market,” the attorneys wrote.  “nor do we believe the rates provided in the USAO matrix accurately reflect the exceptional quality of the legal work performed by Plaintiff’s counsel in securing this historic win.”