Costco Hit With FEHA Fee Award of $471,240 Plus Costs.
In our category “Civil Rights,” you will find cases discussing California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA), a statutory scheme that has a mandatory fee-shifting provision in favor of winning plaintiffs. The next fee award demonstrates that, depending on the ultimate outcome, fee awards can be substantial in difficult cases vindicating civil rights.
Juan Valera sued Costco under FEHA for hostile work environment and sexual orientation discrimination. Although rejecting the sexual orientation discrimination claim, a Los Angeles jury did award him $420,000 for enduring a hostile work environment.
Mr. Valera also moved for attorney’s fees under FEHA. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Maureen Duffy-Lewis ordered Costco to pay his lawyer Leo J. Terrell $471,240 in fees, plus routine costs of $39,540.
This result demonstrates that FEHA fees can sometimes outstrip a nice recovery where an attorney efficiently litigates a matter to a positive conclusion. On the opposite end, FEHA awards can be quite diminished where the outcome was not as positive, there were inefficiencies by the litigating attorneys, or where the matter was not that difficult to resolve.
For more details on this case, see the Daily Breeze Blog of February 11, 2009.
L.A. Daily Journal Article Highlights Slump in Jury Trials.
In our past posts of December 19, 2008 and October 30-31, 2008, we respectively summarized state and federal reports showing that jury trials were on the decline. A recent article by Dhyana Levey, “For the Vanishing Civil Trial, Report Shows Another Down Year,” in The Los Angeles Daily Journal (Feb. 13, 2009 edition) gives added confirmation to the existence of this decline.
In California, the number of jury trials dropped 28% in fiscal year 2006-07 as compared with the previous year. Dating back to the 2002-03 fiscal year, there was a 37% decreased in jury civil trials during the five-year period.
Nationwide, the percentage of state civil cases that went to a jury trial dropped from 1.8% in 1976 to .6% in 2002. (From our previous post, California clocked in at 1.7% for civil unlimited jury trials during the 2006-07 fiscal year.)
At the nationwide federal level, jury trials fell from 5.5% in 1962 to 1.2% in 2002, even though case filings increased fivefold during the same interval.
The Daily Journal article quotes one San Francisco defense attorney as indicating that expense is the driving force behind this phenomenon, with clients not wanting to go to trial if the expenses exceed a settlement and with discovery being the major culprit behind escalating litigation costs (especially given the expense of electronic discovery). Based on the expense of litigation, at least one other attorney opined that this pushes matters into mediation “to get the spending stopped.”