Hourly Rates by Defense Were Reasonable; No Apportionment Required.
Plaintiff, a former employee, sued defendant former employer for unpaid commissions, vacation time, and unreimbursed expenses, requesting an award of attorney’s fees upon prevailing under Labor Code sections 218.5 and 218.6 (wage/hour fee-shifting provisions). Plaintiff brought four causes of action, one of which was expressly under the Labor Code but all involving unpaid wage allegations. Plaintiff was defensed, and the trial court awarded winning defendant $150,519.36 in attorney’s fees--the full defense request. This prompted an appeal by former employee.
Losing plaintiff did not get any relief on appeal in Chamberlin v. Future Sound, LLC, Case No. A135408 (1st Dist., Div. 2 July 8, 2013) (unpublished).
He argued that the defense hourly rates of $450 and later $625 (for a partner), $365 and $375 (for associates), $525 (for a senior associate), and $750 and $780 (for senior partners) were unreasonable for Bay Area attorneys, given that another one of the defense attorneys charged a discounted rate of $250 (down from $350) to defendant as a preferred client. The appellate court sustained the hourly rates submitted in billings, finding no support for the argument that one attorney’s lower hourly rate renders another attorney’s rate unreasonable.
Plaintiff also posited that the fees should have been apportioned, meaning only fees charged for the Labor Code statutory claim were “fair game” for fee reimbursement purposes. Not so, because apportionment is discretionary and not required where all claims are so intertwined such that it would be impracticable to separate time into compensable and noncompensable units. (Bell v. Vista Unified School Dist., 82 Cal.App.4th 672, 686-687 (2000); Akins v. Enterprise Rent-A-Car Co., 79 Cal.App.4th 1127, 1133 (2000).) All of plaintiff’s claims involved the same underling claim of unpaid earnings, such that everything derived from the same common set of facts requiring no apportionment.
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