Opinion ID: 779977
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: whether the award exceeded the request

Text: 30 MBM and McMahan contend the district court's award of any attorney's fees beyond the $152,268.71 incurred as of December 21, 1999 was in error because Toto's counsel voluntarily limited the fee application to those incurred by that date. Toto's attorney's affidavit, submitted as part of the fee application, stated that he cut off the claimed time immediately following the entry of the summary judgment [on December 21, 1999], even though the client has incurred fees to pursue the issue of entitlement to fees which is fairly recoverable. 31 That language could be plausibly interpreted in two ways. It could be construed to mean that any fees incurred from December 21, 1999 to any time in the future were cut off, in the way MBM and McMahan insist. Or it could be read to mean that Toto was not going to seek fees incurred from December 21, 1999, to the date the affidavit was executed, January 20, 2000. Toto claims he initially decided to forego fees incurred during that period in order to simplify the fee application — and in the hope that making such allowance would obviate a fight on reasonableness — which obviously has not happened. As a result of the dispute over fees, Toto now wants to recover fees incurred during that period and afterwards. 32 Although the district court did not explicitly address this issue, it is clear from its order that the court read the fee application as not limiting the recovery of attorney's fees to those incurred before December 21, 1999, because the amount awarded was $260,034.29, well in excess of the $152,268.71 incurred as of that date. Given the ambiguity of the attorney's fee affidavit, the district court did not abuse its discretion in allowing Toto to recover attorney's fees incurred after January 20, 2000. But the attorney's affidavit clearly excluded any fees incurred from December 21, 1999 to January 20, 2000, and Toto never amended his application to seek those fees. Therefore, fees from that period should not have been awarded, and we remand to the district court to determine that amount and subtract it from the attorney's fees award. 33