10% Reduction for Improper Redaction Was Not Enough to Compensate for Deficient Fee Substantiation.
This is an interesting decision on the substantiation of fees area, which again has us reminding practitioners to be careful to not over “redact” fee billings placed before the trial court. (For some helpful past insight, see our prior posts of June 30, 2008 on Gregg I and Gregg II.)
City of Lake Forest v. Lake Forest BodyCentre, Case No. G043301 (4th Dist., Div. 3 Feb. 9, 2012) (unpublished) is a situation where City of Lake Forest was awarded substantial attorney’s fees of $456,962.11 for winning a nuisance abatement action under the Red Light Abatement Law--with Civil Code section 3496 allowing a lower court discretion to award fees and costs, as it did here, in such cases. However, the problem was that the public entity fee claimant submitted billing statements that were “redacted beyond comprehension,” and provided no other real detail in the supporting attorney declarations.
The result can hardly be surprising, a reversal and remand. The lower court did try to save resources by simply reducing the lodestar by 10% for the over-redactions, but the appellate court felt that a remand was proper given that the other proof--the attorney declarations--provided no further enlightenment.
As far as City’s costs memorandum, it almost lost its costs request because it failed to provide the worksheet back-up to the one-page summary Judicial Council forms, which we have cautioned our blog followers to not do. Provide some detail. Here, in opposition to the motion to strike/tax costs, the detail was provided so that the costs award was affirmed. (In fact, our January 15, 2012 post on Anderson v. Pacific Asian Enterprises presented a situation where Justice Fybel--see below--did uphold denial of deposition costs where only the Judicial Council one-page summary was used.)
BLOG UNDERVIEW--Justice Fybel was the author of this 3-0 opinion. He indicated at a past L.A. County Bar section meeting that practitioners need to provide a “roadmap” to trial and appellate courts when presenting fee petitions, something that is not done when overly redacted billings are used. We would point out two other interesting unpublished decisions we posted on previously, which suggest some options in this area: either waive the privilege and don’t redact (or redact judiciously) or provide very detailed attorney declarations on tasks/hours/work effort so that an intelligent decision can be made on fee requests. (See our March 31, 2011 post on Johnson [unpublished Fifth District decision] and our December 20, 2011 post on Fullerton v. Monogram Real Estate [unpublished Fourth District, Division 3 decision authored by Justice O’Leary].)
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