Opinion ID: 156986
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Size of General Reduction

Text: 40 In Parts III.A.1.c. and III.A.1.d. of this opinion, we have concluded that the district court properly made general reductions to the appellants' requested hours because of difficulties with the appellants' billings regarding certain standing issues, background research, and conferences. However, while those reductions were of a proper type, they were of an improper degree. Even a cursory review of the appellants' billing records shows that the hours spent on resisting standing, conferences, and background research did not account for 80% of the appellants' requested time. 41 As we have already noted, there are legitimate cases in which a large general reduction in requested fees is warranted. See Mares v. Credit Bureau of Raton, 801 F.2d 1197 (10th Cir.1986). In Mares, however, we said such a reduction is permissible so long as there is sufficient reason for its use. Id. at 1203. There, the district court specifically gave inexperience as the reason for eliminating a large portion of trial preparation time, and that finding was clearly supported since counsel had been in practice just a year when he took the case, conceded his lack of experience, and billed every hour logged. We also pointed out that counsel failed entirely on his major theory of damage, grossly overvalued what the case would warrant, and [d]oubtless, he uselessly expended time on those theories. Id. at 1204. In short, the record supported both the type and the degree of the reductions made by the district court. 42 Unlike in Mares, the record in this case does not support the degree of the reductions made by the district court. The district court found that 510 hours were a reasonable number of hours for appellants to spend litigating a case in which defendants acknowledged billing 1,050 hours. Moreover, the 1,050 hours the defendants confessed did not include the hours spent on this litigation by the school district's regular attorney, who defended and took depositions, produced documents, met with and prepared witnesses, corresponded with appellants, and appeared at trial. Additionally, as we have already noted, this case concerned novel legal issues, which defendants vigorously litigated through motions to dismiss and for summary judgment and by disputing discovery so that motions to compel and sanctions were necessary. Again, we iterate that the defendants' hours are not a floor for the appellants' reasonable time because the defendants may have billed or litigated unreasonably. However, if this is to be the rare case, supra at 1250-51, in which the district court is justified in awarding significantly fewer hours to plaintiff then proposed as reasonable by the losing defendant, the district court must give us a fuller explanation for its actions. 43 Here, the district court said nothing at all about why the hours spent by defendants' counsel are not relevant, nothing about the maneuvering necessitated by the defendants' litigation strategy, and so on. See City of Riverside v. Rivera, 477 U.S. 561, 580 n. 11, 106 S.Ct. 2686, 91 L.Ed.2d 466 (1986) (the defendant cannot litigate tenaciously and then be heard to complain about the time necessarily spent by the plaintiff in response); Ramos, 713 F.2d at 554 (noting that the district court should consider that what is reasonable in a particular case can depend upon factors such as ... the responses necessitated by the maneuvering of the other side). The district court did not say defendants billed or litigated unreasonably, but if defendants did, the court should tell us if, in its judgment, the appellants responded inappropriately to defendants' unreasonable efforts. Instead, the district court only mentioned three limited areas of this litigation as justification for throwing 80% of the appellants' fee request out the window. 44 We simply have no way of knowing why the court chose to depart so dramatically from defendants' expenditure of time in setting appellants' counsel's hours and, accordingly, no way of reviewing the district court's decision. We certainly do not require district courts to produce the equivalent of an alternative billing record complete with a blow-by-blow account of how many hours were reasonably spent on a given reasonable task. Even under the abuse of discretion standard, however, we are not comfortable affirming an 80% reduction in appellants' hours to a level over 50% below the time spent by the defendants in a hotly litigated case involving novel First Amendment issues without at least some explanation for why defendants' evidence of reasonable hours and the time defendants actually spent was not relevant to determining appellants' reasonable hours. If § 1988 is to have any meaningful effect in ensuring sound representation for civil rights plaintiffs, the district court's discretion in awarding fees cannot be so broad as to allow it carte blanche to give a victorious plaintiff half the time to obtain a favorable result as the defendants spent in losing without providing us more justification for so doing. We therefore reverse the district court's general reduction in hours and remand for further consideration by the district court in light of this opinion. 45