Opinion ID: 792212
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Testifying Experts

Text: 83 Honeywell challenges the District Court's decision to award more than $780,000 for the time and costs of three expert witnesses and their respective business entities, i.e. the award of (1) $389,807.59 for the work of Dr. Bruce Bell and Carpenter Environmental Associates; (2) $194,491.54 for the work of Dr. Ben Ross and Disposal Safety Incorporated (DSI); and (3) $184,492.31 for the work of Dr. Cheryl Montgomery and Cambridge Environmental. 84 As with the time claimed by counsel, the prevailing party bears the burden of justifying the time claimed by its expert witnesses. Similarly, the district court has the obligation to conduct a thorough and searching review of the time claimed by a prevailing party's experts. In this case, the District Court failed to do so. While the District Court did address one substantive argument raised by Honeywell (that ICO and ECARG should have retained the same experts), its analysis of the hours claimed by ICO's three experts was limited to the following: 85 The work performed by the experts retained by Plaintiff in this matter was vital to their success at trial. The work of the experts greatly assisted this Court in evaluating some of the more technical aspects of the litigation, and was also necessary to rebut the technical information presented by Honeywell. Accordingly, this Court finds that the work done by each of ICO's experts was reasonable based on the length and complexity of this litigation. 86 336 F.Supp.2d at 398. 87 The fact that the work of the experts assisted the Court does not, by itself, imply that the amount of time claimed by the three experts was reasonable. Rather, as was the case with the time ICO's attorneys claimed, the District Court has an obligation to `go line, by line, by line' through the billing records supporting the fee request. Evans, 273 F.3d at 362. Similarly, the Court must give us a sufficiently detailed explanation of its reasoning so that we can engage in meaningful appellate review. Since it failed to do so, we will vacate the award of fees for the three experts (and their respective business entities). 88 We also note that duplicative billing may have occurred. For example, Dr. Montgomery claimed that it took her 246 hours to prepare an expert report because she needed to review documents, but Dr. Montgomery separately billed another 570 hours for document review.