Opinion ID: 765608
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Miscellaneous claims for adjusting the fee award

Text: 53 The Colegio contends that the court should have adjusted the fee award downwards for work on losing claims advanced by plaintiffs. I have already considered and rejected these partial success fee reduction arguments in my Discussion of the degree of success issue, above. The Colegio also objects to the court's failure to reduce the fee award for hours spent on motions by plaintiffs that were dismissed, for allegedly excessive hours claimed for individual tasks, and for clerical tasks allegedly inappropriately performed by lawyers. The district court gave these claims careful consideration in rejecting the majority of them, 33 see Schneider X, slip op. at 5-6, and we have properly refrained from disturbing its exercise of discretion here. 54 Citing no authority, see Appellant's Br. at 34-37, the Colegio and Secretaries challenge the district court's refusal to discount the fees award for time spent by plaintiffs pursuing unsuccessful or partially successful appeals to this court. The Schneider II proceeding, for instance, resulted in the grant of a writ of mandamus to the defendant/petitioner Justices, reducing them to nominal parties; our decision in the Schneider V appeal vacated the district court's decision in favor of plaintiffs and ordered abstention; and our Schneider VIII decision temporarily stayed an injunction granting relief sought by plaintiffs. However, the prevalent approach to determining whether a plaintiff is a prevailing party on appeal[] is to inquire whether the plaintiff has prevailed in the litigation as a whole. John E. Kirklin, Section 1983 Litigation: Statutory Attorney's Fees 29 (3d. ed. 1997); see also Cabrales v. County of Los Angeles, 935 F.2d 1050, 1053 (9th Cir. 1991) (a plaintiff who is unsuccessful at a stage of litigation that was a necessary step to her ultimate victory is entitled to attorney's fees even for the unsuccessful stage); Buffington v. Baltimore County, 913 F.2d 113, 128 n.12 (4th Cir. 1990) (district court need not revisit fees award for first trial, which ended in mistrial, where plaintiff prevailed in subsequent trial); Alizadeh v. Safeway Stores, Inc., 910 F.2d 234, 237-38 (5th Cir. 1990) (fees awarded for work on appeal which resulted in reversal of summary judgment in favor of Safeway, which then prevailed at trial; ultimate success on merits made award of fees for the entire course of the litigation reasonable exercise of district court's discretion); Ustrak v. Fairman, 851 F.2d 983, 990 (7th Cir. 1988) (plaintiff had prima facie entitlement to entire fees in this court on appeal (from fees award) where fee award was affirmed but reduced by a third); Dougherty v. Barry, 820 F. Supp. 20, 25 (D.D.C. 1993) (rejecting attempt to bifurcate failure on appeal from success at trial; reasonable fees would be determined by examination of the entire case). 55 Here, Schneider and Ramos ultimately succeeded in achieving a significant portion of the relief sought, despite a number of backwards steps along the convoluted pathway this litigation took through the courts (including this court of appeals). I have no difficulty concluding that the district court was within its discretion in refusing to discount hours spent in unsuccessfully defending appeals, especially where the appellate setbacks suffered by plaintiffs were largely procedural in nature (here, reducing the Justices from defendants to nominal defendants, postponing (temporarily, as it turned out) the exercise of federal jurisdiction, and temporarily postponing the effectiveness of an injunction). Cf. Jaffee v. Redmond, 142 F.3d 409, 414 (7th Cir. 1998) (an unsuccessful but reasonable argument in support of a successful claim may be compensable.). The result might be different were the unsuccessful appeals initiated by the plaintiffs, but that was not the case for the three appeals to this court mentioned above. See Ustrak, 851 F.2d at 990 (for purposes of determining whether unsuccessful appeal is sufficiently related to plaintiff's success, a distinction should be made between an appellant and an appellee; where defendant appeals and plaintiff incurs expenses in defending against the appeal that are reasonable even though they are not crowned by complete success, plaintiff/appellee should be awarded fees since he had no choice but to incur them or forfeit his victory in the district court.). 34