Opinion ID: 2376955
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 21

Heading: Allocation of Costs and Fees Among Claims

Text: ¶ 70 The PRA awards the prevailing party all costs, including reasonable attorney fees. RCW 42.56.550(4). [22] ¶ 71 To determine the extent to which Justice Sanders prevailed, the trial court separated the case into four issues: (1) whether the documents withheld by AGO were exempt, (2) the remedy for a violation of the brief explanation requirement, [23] (3) whether AGO's search for records was legally sufficient, and (4) whether AGO's subsequent production was ipso facto an admission that the SPDs were nonexempt and thus withheld wrongfully. CP at 1854-56. The issues bore the following weights, based on their difficulty and the work involved in litigating them: (1) 50 percent, (2) 10 percent, (3) 20 percent, (4) 20 percent. CP at 1859-60. Justice Sanders prevailed on only the first of these issues and only on some 5 percent of the documents. Id. However, the trial court did not believe a pro rata allocation was appropriate because the amount of effort to contend that the final disputed document was nonexempt was far less than the effort to contend that the first few documents were nonexempt. In other words, there were economies of scale involved, such that it was fairer to award Justice Sanders 75 percent of the fees allocated to issue (1). CP. at 1860-61. The court therefore awarded Justice Sanders 37.5 percent (75 percent × 50 percent) of his total fee request. Id.; see also CP at 1845 n. 1. ¶ 72 Justice Sanders argues that the trial court incorrectly subdivided and assigned weight to the issues. Justice Sanders believes the issue of the AGO's search for documents was collateral at best. Also, the trial court counted the SPDs as a separate issue on which the State prevailed, despite the fact that the court ruled that some of the SPDs were wrongfully withheld. Furthermore, he contends, the trial court held that AGO prevailed on the brief explanation claim despite the fact that the court found the State to be in violation of the PRA on that requirement. This issue should have received more than 10 percent weight. Finally, the propriety of withholding the disputed documents was assigned only 50 percent weight, and the trial court considered Justice Sanders to have prevailed on only 5 percent of that, despite the fact that Justice Sanders showed that some of the documents were nonexempt and could not have obtained this ruling without expending all of the attorney fees requested. Justice Sanders maintains that he is entitled to all of his requested costs and fees because his total expenditure was indivisible. ¶ 73 Whether to award costs and attorney fees is a legal issue reviewed de novo. See Spokane Research, 155 Wash.2d at 103-04 & n. 10, 117 P.3d 1117. We have not articulated a standard of review for how much to award, however. Some Court of Appeals cases have concluded that the amount should be reviewed for abuse of discretion. [24] This approach mirrors review of attorney fee awards in other contexts. E.g., Magaña v. Hyundai Motor Am., 167 Wash.2d 570, 593, 220 P.3d 191 (2009). It also mirrors the review of penalties under the PRA, in which whether to award is mandatory but how much to award is discretionary. See Yousoufian I, 152 Wash.2d at 430-33, 98 P.3d 463. We adopt the abuse of discretion standard. ¶ 74 It is clear that a court has the discretion to apportion an award of costs and fees so that it does not relate to any exempt documents. Limstrom v. Ladenburg, 136 Wash.2d 595, 616, 963 P.2d 869 (1998) (requiring that an award relate only to that which is disclosed and not to any portion of the requested documents found to be exempt); Dawson, 120 Wash.2d at 800, 845 P.2d 995 (same), abrogated on other grounds by PAWS II, 125 Wash.2d at 257-58, 884 P.2d 592. Whether the trial court had authority to apportion the award based on other issues in the casei.e., besides the propriety of withholding each documentis a more difficult question. We have held that the `prevailing' inquiry under RCW 42.56.550(4) [25] relates to the legal question of whether the records should have been disclosed on request, suggesting that this is the only relevant issue. Spokane Research, 155 Wash.2d at 103, 117 P.3d 1117. [26] But in Spokane Research, no issue pertaining to the brief explanation requirement or the remedy for its violation appeared. Since the right to a response also appears in the costs and fees provision, it would seem at a minimum that these issues should also factor into the fee and cost apportionment. See RCW 42.56.550(4) [27] (entitling a party vindicating the right to receive a response to a public record request to costs and attorney fees). ¶ 75 On the other hand, the trial judge also considered one of the issues to be the sufficiency of AGO's search for documents. This search issue does not appear in the costs and fees provision and so perhaps should not be considered when awarding costs and fees. But, we need not decide the question. As indicated above, the real issue was whether there was a genuine issue of fact precluding summary judgment. No party prevailed on the nonissue of the sufficiency of the search. ¶ 76 The issues relevant to the apportionment of costs and fees, then, were (1) the ultimate validity of the claimed exemptions, (2) the brief explanation violation, (3) the remedy for a brief explanation violation, and (4) the effect of subsequent production on AGO's claims of exemption. The first issue was primary, while the other three were secondary. The trial court assigned no weight to the brief explanation violation because it was obvious. This is unusual: Justice Sanders's attorneys established the violation by suing. By way of analogy, one would not deny costs and attorney fees to a prevailing party in an action under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 just because it was obvious that the party's constitutional rights were violated. We give the existence of the brief explanation violation the same weight as the remedy for the violation. ¶ 77 Viewing the issues in this light, the chief question in the case was the propriety of withholding the documents AGO claimed were exempt. Around 95 percent of the claimed exemptions proved valid, suggesting that Justice Sanders's fees and costs should be deeply discounted. Limstrom, 136 Wash.2d at 616, 963 P.2d 869. Justice Sanders prevailed on one secondary issue, his brief explanation claim, but did not prevail on the other two secondary issues. Under these circumstances, the trial court's award of 37.5 percent of Justice Sanders's requested costs and fees appears reasonable. While we may quibble with some of the trial court's reasoning, on the whole its award of fees and costs was within its discretion.