Opinion ID: 1450589
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The District Court Acted Within Its Discretion in Reducing Attorney's Fees

Text: In addition to providing for liquidated damages, the FLSA directs courts to award prevailing plaintiffs reasonable attorney's fees and costs. See 29 U.S.C. § 216(b) (providing that [t]he court in such action shall, in addition to any judgment awarded to the plaintiff or plaintiffs, allow a reasonable attorney's fee to be paid by the defendant, and costs of the action). We afford a district court considerable discretion in determining what constitutes reasonable attorney's fees in a given case, mindful of the court's superior understanding of the litigation and the desirability of avoiding frequent appellate review of what essentially are factual matters. Hensley v. Eckerhart, 461 U.S. 424, 437, 103 S.Ct. 1933, 76 L.Ed.2d 40 (1983). While an erroneous application of law or clear error of fact may indicate abuse of this discretion, see id.; Patterson v. Balsamico, 440 F.3d 104, 123 (2d Cir.2006), that is not this case. In determining reasonable attorney's fees in this case, the district court employed a two-step technique whereby it first calculated a lodestar amount of $99,778.75, determined by multiplying the reasonable hours worked on the case (282.7 attorney hours, 2.3 travel hours, and 5.75 paralegal hours) by a reasonable hourly rate of compensation ($350 per attorney hour, $175 per travel hour, and $75 per paralegal hour), see Hensley v. Eckerhart, 461 U.S. at 433-34 & n. 9, 103 S.Ct. 1933, and then reduced this loadstar by 50 percent based on case-specific considerations, see Blanchard v. Bergeron, 489 U.S. 87, 94, 109 S.Ct. 939, 103 L.Ed.2d 67 (1989), specifically, plaintiff's failure to secure certification of the case as a collective action under the FLSA. See Barfield v. N.Y. City Health & Hosps. Corp., 2006 WL 2356152, at , . In Arbor Hill Concerned Citizens Neighborhood Association v. County of Albany, 522 F.3d 182 (2d Cir.2008), this court recently traced the evolution of this two-step process and the confusion sometimes attending its application before concluding that the lodestar metaphor should be abandoned, see id. at 190. Henceforth, we have advised district courts, in exercising their considerable discretion ... to bear in mind all of the case-specific variables that we and other courts have identified as relevant to the reasonableness of attorney's fees in setting a reasonable hourly rate to be used in calculating a `presumptively reasonable fee.' Id. (emphasis in original). The district court in this case, operating without the benefit of the Arbor Hill decision, did not employ its specific technique for determining a presumptively reasonable fee, but that is not a concern on this appeal where plaintiff does not challenge the lodestar calculation but only the 50 percent reduction applied to it. In considering Barfield's fee challenge, we are mindful of the Supreme Court's observation that the most critical factor in a district court's determination of what constitutes reasonable attorney's fees in a given case is the degree of success obtained by the plaintiff. Farrar v. Hobby, 506 U.S. 103, 114, 113 S.Ct. 566, 121 L.Ed.2d 494 (1992); accord Kassim v. City of Schenectady, 415 F.3d 246, 254 (2d Cir. 2005); Pino v. Locascio, 101 F.3d 235, 237-38 (2d Cir.1996). Barfield asserts that no fee reduction for lack of success was warranted in her case because she did, in fact, succeed on the single FLSA claim alleged in her complaint. She submits that a motion for FLSA collective action certification is not a claim and, thus, failure on such a motion does not support a fee reduction. We are not persuaded. A district court's assessment of the degree of success achieved in a case is not limited to inquiring whether a plaintiff prevailed on individual claims. See Kassim v. City of Schenectady, 415 F.3d at 254. Both the quantity and quality of relief obtained, as compared to what the plaintiff sought to achieve as evidenced in her complaint, are key factors in determining the degree of success achieved. Carroll v. Blinken, 105 F.3d 79, 81 (2d Cir.1997). Indeed, this comparison promotes the court's `central' responsibility to `make the assessment of what is a reasonable fee under the circumstances of the case.' Farrar v. Hobby, 506 U.S. at 114-15, 113 S.Ct. 566 (quoting Blanchard v. Bergeron, 489 U.S. at 96, 109 S.Ct. 939). We agree with the district court that plaintiff's primary aim in this litigation, as reflected in her complaint and in the first four months of litigation ... was to certify a collective action. Barfield v. N.Y. City Health & Hosps. Corp., 2006 WL 2356152, at . As the district court noted, plaintiff had urged certification to secure relief for thousands of workers. Id. Her motion failed because counsel could not make even the modest factual showing required to support an FLSA collective action. Id. It is against this background of anticipated relief for thousands that plaintiff's recovery of $1,744.50 in compensatory and liquidated damages for herself appears to reflect only a small degree of success. Indeed, plaintiff's failure to certify a collective action precluded declaratory and injunctive relief, which was sought on behalf of individuals, unlike plaintiff, who were still working for defendants. As noted above, the district court was rightly concerned that not reducing the fee award in these circumstances would pose two risks: (a) decreasing the incentive for plaintiffs' lawyers vigorously to litigate collective action certification, and (b) encouraging plaintiffs' lawyers to file collective action-based claims even where there is little basis for doing so. See id. at ; see also Hensley v. Eckerhart, 461 U.S. at 436, 103 S.Ct. 1933 (noting that [i]f a plaintiff has achieved only partial or limited success, the product of hours reasonably expended on the litigation as a whole times a reasonable hourly rate may be an excessive amount ... even where the plaintiff's claims were interrelated, non-frivolous, and raised in good faith). Barfield asserts that, even if the district court acted within its discretion in reducing the fee to reflect her failure to certify a collective action, it abused its discretion in applying a 50 percent reduction, as opposed to subtracting the number of hours expended on plaintiff's unsuccessful attempt to certify a collective action. Specifically, plaintiff submits that, instead of the 142.5 hour reduction, the district court should have subtracted at most 63 hours of work, the time expended on the case up until the denial of collective action certification. While plaintiff's arithmetic has the virtue of simple application, we are not persuaded that the district court exceeded its discretion in concluding that this proposed reduction did not adequately reflect the plaintiff's limited success in this case. Barfield's potential recovery in this case was not, after all, a matter of debate, as in tort or civil rights cases. The amount of unpaid overtime was easily determined at the outset to be only $887.25. Even doubled for liquidated damages, this recovery does not reflect such a degree of success as to compel an award for the full attorney's fees incurred after denial of class certification. [10] In this respect the district court got it exactly right: the reasonableness of the attorney's fees incurred linked directly to the ability to maintain the case as an FLSA collective action. Accordingly, we identify no abuse of discretion in its decision to reduce the fee for the success in pursuing Barfield's claim by itself to $49,889.