Fourth District, Division Three Affirm Lower Court Determination That Requested Fees Were Excessive--Involving Overstaffing, Vague Block Billing, and Billing for Anti-SLAPP Motion Tasks.
Prevailing defendants in anti-SLAPP proceedings are entitled to attorney's fees and costs. Code Civ. Proc., § 425.16(c). However, the prevailing defendant can only recover for anti-SLAPP activities, not work related to the entire litigation. (SeeS.B. Properties v. Berti, 39 Cal.4th 374, 381 (2006).) Equally important, the prevailing defendant seeking reimbursement of fees and costs bears the burden of proving fee entitlement and the reasonableness of the amount of fees to be awarded. (ComputerXpress, Inc. v. Jackson, 93 Cal.App.4th 993, 1020 (2001).)
All of these principles came into play in the next case, which also restressed some important lessons--avoid blockbilled time entries and avoid overstaffing of cases.
In Christian Research Institute v. Alnor, Case No. G039424 (4th Dist., Div. 3 Aug. 13, 2008) (certified for publication), prevailing defendant on an anti-SLAPP motion moved to recover from plaintiffs over $250,000 in attorney's fees, broken down as 638.6 hours of work on the anti-SLAPP motion (228.7 of the total hours) and a prior appeal of the motion which was affirmed in defendant's favor (about 410 hours). The trial court did not buy the request, awarding instead $21,300 in attorney's fees and $1,494.83 in costs. This broke down to compensation for 25 hours on the anti-SLAPP motion, 40 hours on the appeal, and 6 hours for the subsequent fee motion. The trial court found that the 600-plus hours were excessive, the case was overstaffed with five attorneys, the anti-SLAPP motion was not particularly complex (with plaintiff conceding the public interest prong of the analysis), much of the work done by different lawyers was duplicative and unnecessary, blockbilled entries obscured the nature of some work claimed, and much of the work was related to preparing the case for trial than for anti-SLAPP activities. Defendant appealed, with the lower court's determination affirmed on appeal, with plaintiffs winning costs on appeal.
Justice Aronson, writing for a 3-0 panel of the Fourth District, Division Three, found no abuse of discretion under the deferential review standard. (See Ketchum v. Moses, 24 Cal.4th 1122, 1132 (2001) [one of our Leading Cases]; Maughan v. Google Technology, Inc., 143 Cal.App.4th 1242, 1249 (2006).)
Initially, the appellate panel found that the trial court correctly applied the lodestar method, compensating defendant at a reasonable $300 hourly rate. The real focus of the appeal was on the reasonableness of the work effort for which compensation was sought.
Our local Santa Ana-based court concluded there was no abuse of discretion in drastically reducing the 600-plus hour fee request. These points resonated as important in reaching this conclusion:
· Defendant improperly sought to transfer to opposing parties the costs of every minute counsel expended on the case, whether or not anti-SLAPP work was involved ("Counsel's willingness to flout the statutory restriction on the scope of anti-SLAPP fee claims justified the trial court in taking a jaundiced view of the fee request," Slip Opn. at p. 11);
· Defendant compounded the unauthorized reimbursement requests with vague block billing entries, with 20 "further handling" entries and one-third of the entries not involving anti-SLAPP work ("Blockbilling, while not objectionable per se in our view, exacerbated the vagueness of counsel's fee request, a risky choice since the burden of proving entitlement to fees rests on the moving party," Slip Opn. at p. 11, and "An attorney's chief asset in submitting a fee request is his or her credibility, and where vague, blockbilled time entries inflated with noncompensable hours destroy an attorney's credibility with the trial court, we have no power on appeal to restore it," Slip Opn. at pp. 11-12);
· Defendant's anti-SLAPP motion did not require intensive discovery or paperwork, the issues were mainly hornbook in nature, and the one novel issue on appeal was resolved by the appellate court without the aid of defendant (Slip Opn., at pp. 12-15); and
· The case was overstaffed ("Indeed, the five attorneys [defendant] deployed on the motion appear to have expended more time telephoning, conferencing, and e-mailing each other than on identifiable legal research for the motion, supporting the trial court's conclusion the matter was overstaffed," Slip Opn. at p. 13).
Defendant argued that the trial court only had discretion to reduce individualized improper billing entries. This contention was easily dispatched with this observation: "…counsel may not submit a plethora of noncompensable, vague, blockbilled attorney time entries and expect particularized, individual deletions as the only consequence. The trial court could reasonably conclude counsel made no effort to prune the fee request to comply with the law. Counsel erred grievously by attempting to transfer that responsibility onto the trial court. The trial court could reasonably conclude counsel's disregard for the law undercut the credibility of their fee request and, as officers of the court, warranted a severe reaction," Slip Opn. at p. 16—namely, a wholesale reduction of a substantial nature to the amount of fees requested.
BLOG UNDERVIEW--This case reinforces many of the lessons stressed by the speakers at the June 19, 2008 NALFA conference in Los Angeles, summarized in our June 20, 2008 post. Alnor's reasoning on overstaffing and blockbilling parrots the advice coming from the panelists at the NALFA conference to avoid these two pitfalls. The decision also underscores a crucial truth: a fee claimant's credibility may be the most important factor in the equation, meaning a fee petition must be honest in requesting a fee that is reasonable for the efforts actually achieved. Once this credibility is lost, a drastically small fee award or no fee award may be the end result.
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