Source: https://nahmodlaw.com/2010/06/07/purdue-v-kenny-a-new-supreme-court-attorneys-fees-decision/
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 12:42:24+00:00

Document:
The Civil Rights Attorney’s Fees Awards Act of 1976, 42 U.S.C. § 1988, provides that prevailing plaintiffs in § 1983 and other civil rights cases (excluding prisoners who are separately covered by the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995) are ordinarily entitled to a reasonable attorney’s fee unless special circumstances render such an award unjust. Typically, and to oversimplify, a reasonable attorney’s fee is based on what is called the “lodestar,” namely, the number of hours worked multiplied by the normal hourly billing rate. This lodestar is then modified to take account of the extent of the plaintiff’s success. See Hensley v. Eckerhart, 461 U.S. 424 (1983), dealing with the extent of success, and Blum v. Stenson, 465 U.S. 886 (1984), addressing prevailing market rates. The Court has declared that enhancements to the lodestar based on the contingency of success are not permissible under other statutory attorney’s fees provisions, City of Burlington v. Dague, 505 U.S. 557 (1992), and therefore are not permissible under § 1988 as well because of similar statutory language.
Question: What about enhancements to the lodestar based on the quality of an attorney’s performance and the results obtained? After Purdue v. Kenny A., 130 S. Ct. — (2010), the short answer is that these are permissible only in truly extraordinary circumstances.
Purdue v. Kenny A., which involved a consent decree arising out of the plaintiff childrens’ successful class action against Georgia officials alleging structural deficiencies in Georgia’s foster-care system, dealt with the question of whether an attorney’s fees award based on the lodestar can ever be enhanced based solely on the quality of an attorney’s performance and the results obtained. A panel of the Eleventh Circuit had affirmed the district court’s $4.5 million enhancement of the $6 million lodestar figure based on these two factors.
The Court went on to reverse the district court because it did not explain why it had increased the lodestar by 75 percent and not some other percentage. In addition, the district court did not specify the connection between the enhancing factors it had identified and the actual amounts attributed to these factors. It was also inappropriate for the district court to compare the performance of the attorneys here with the performance of attorneys in unnamed other cases because this did not allow for meaningful judicial review. The Court, reversing and remanding, concluded: “[U]njustified enhancements that serve only to enrich attorneys are not consistent with [§ 1988’s] aim” particularly since in most cases the fees are paid by state and local taxpayers.
Although the Court answered the Question Presented in the affirmative, pretty clearly it did so in a purely technical and very narrow way. As a practical matter, the Court sent a strong message to the lower courts when it reversed and remanded in Purdue.
It will be an exceedingly rare case in which the lodestar may be enhanced based upon superior performance by a prevailing plaintiff’s attorney. As a general principle, according to the Court, the lodestar will have already taken account of this factor.

References: § 1988
 § 1983
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