A federal judge awarded less than half the requested attorneys’ fees (pdf) in a class action accusing Acer of making and selling computers that lack the memory to run the pre-installed operating system.  His final order (pdf) reduced fees down from the requested $2.5 million to $943,000.  In explaining his significant cuts, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White of the Northern District of California found that three law firms representing consumers in a suit against computer maker Acer America Corp. had billed too many hours, charged too much and overstated the complexity of the class action case.

In cutting the attorneys’ fees, Judge Jeffrey White found that the three law firms representing the plaintiffs were not efficient and spent excessive amounts of time on the tasks listed.  He noted that the law firms spent an “exorbitant” 547 hours on attorney meetings and 184 hours on court appearances, “despite the fact that the court vacated all hearings,” except for the hearing on final settlement approval and attorney fees.  He also noted that there was significant duplication of work between the three law firms in concluding that only 1,750 hours of the 4,633 hours tallied by plaintiffs’ attorneys—a reduction of 62 percent—was reasonable under the circumstances.

Judge White also discounted the hourly rates sought by the three law firms.  He found that while the supporting affidavits submitted by the law firms provided hourly billing rates of lawyers in Los Angeles, Ohio, Washington, DC and elsewhere, none provided relevant market rates in Northern California.  Consequently, he set the rates for paralegals, associates, partners and senior partners at $175, $350, $500 and $550, respectively. 

Judge White then further reduced the fees sought by employing a negative multiplier of 0.75 to ensure “the fee award [was] within the range of fees freely negotiated in the legal marketplace in comparable litigation.”

Lawyers from the three law firms argued the attorney fees sought were justified because the technical complexity of the case.  Judge White disagreed.  He explained: “The Court notes that while the facts underlying the plaintiffs’ claims were technically complicated, the legal analysis regarding their warranty and misrepresentation claims was not complex.”

The case is Wolph v. Acer America Corporation.  For more on this case visit http://www.acerlawsuit.com