Opinion ID: 1269651
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Mendez's Request for Attorney's Fees and Costs

Text: After the jury's verdict in her favor, Mendez moved for attorney's fees and costs under 42 U.S.C. § 1988. Section 1988(b) authorizes the district court to award the prevailing party a reasonable attorney's fee in any suit to enforce the provisions of 42 U.S.C. § 1983. As the Supreme Court has noted, [t]he purpose of § 1988 is to ensure `effective access to the judicial process' for persons with civil rights grievances. Hensley v. Eckerhart, 461 U.S. 424, 429, 103 S.Ct. 1933, 76 L.Ed.2d 40 (1983) (quoting H.R.Rep. No. 94-1558, p. 1 (1976)). Therefore, a prevailing plaintiff should ordinarily recover an attorney's fee unless special circumstances would render such an award unjust. Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). Although a district court's award of attorney's fees is generally reviewed for abuse of discretion, we only arrive at discretionary review if we are satisfied that the correct legal standard was applied and that none of the district court's findings of fact were clearly erroneous. Thomas v. City of Tacoma, 410 F.3d 644, 647 (9th Cir.2005). The district court acknowledged that Mendez was a prevailing plaintiff and therefore was ordinarily entitled to a reasonable attorney's fee, but nonetheless denied her request for costs and fees in its entirety, finding that her request was so excessive that [it] warrant[s] a denial of fees altogether. Mendez argues that the district court erred by denying her all costs and fees. We agree, and so we reverse and remand for a determination of reasonable costs and fees.
Following the jury's verdict, Mendez moved the district court for an award of fees in the amount of $727,558, attaching supporting affidavits and other documentation to her motion. Mendez was represented by attorneys from the law firm Morrison & Foerster, LLP. An affidavit from her lead counsel explained that counsel had spent 2,570 hours preparing for and trying her case, excluding hours that were spent pursuing her unsuccessful Monell claim against the County and the claims Mendez voluntarily dismissed. Mendez requested that the two partners who worked on her case be compensated at between $450 and $550 per hour, which was the typical rate at which they billed their clients at that time. Mendez asked that the two associates who primarily worked on the case be compensated at rates between $250 and $300 per hour, which was somewhat below their usual market rate. Mendez's counsel stated that the final fee request was calculated after voluntarily discounting the partners' hours by 10 percent and the associates' and paralegals' hours by 20 percent, in order to address any concerns that the Court or the defendants may have that on any given day or task, any person may have devoted too much time to any particular project, or to alleviate any concerns that the rates sought are too high. Lastly, Mendez stated that she had incurred more than $80,000 in costs, but was requesting only $70,000, again in an attempt to avoid disputes over the propriety of particular costs. The County did not contest Mendez's entitlement to attorney's fees and costs under § 1988, but did object to certain hours it deemed excessive and certain costs it found objectionable. In calculating an appropriate fee award for Mendez, the County proposed that 1,999 hours of work were reasonably expended on the case. After reducing the partners' and associates' billing rates to $300 and $150 per hour respectively  which the County considered more reasonable rates for civil rights work  the County suggested that $390,225 in fees were reasonably incurred. The County asked the court to reduce this figure by 75 percent, however, based on what it argued was the limited degree of success the plaintiffs had achieved, resulting in a final proposed fee award of $97,556. The County similarly proposed an across-the-board reduction of Mendez's costs by 75 percent, suggesting that the court award no more than $18,009. In reply, Mendez agreed to further reduce certain hours and costs to accommodate the County's specific objections and agreed to a slight reduction in the partners' billing rates, but refused to accept any percentage reduction to the overall costs or fees based on the alleged poor degree of success. Mendez's final request, after adding in additional hours spent working on the case since the motion for attorney's fees was filed, was for $727,307 in fees and $65,000 in costs. Despite Mendez's success on the merits and the County's acknowledgment that she was entitled to recover what it considered reasonable attorney's fees and costs, the district court denied her request for fees and costs entirely. During a hearing on the motion for attorney's fees, the district court called Mendez's request the most excessive fee request I have ever seen and told the parties that it believed there was case law that would support simply denying the request. The court noted that it did not think Mendez's case was particularly complicated, because it involved no novel issues of constitutional law and the events in question occurred over a relatively short time span. The court also observed that the suit had not achieved any significant success, because the jury awarded Mendez only nominal and punitive damages on two of her claims. The court requested supplemental briefing from the parties to address the possible applicability of Scham v. District Courts Trying Criminal Cases, 148 F.3d 554 (5th Cir.1998), abrogated on other grounds by Bailey v. Mississippi, 407 F.3d 684 (5th Cir.2005), and Brown v. Stackler, 612 F.2d 1057 (7th Cir.1980), two cases where courts of appeals held that a court may deny a request for attorney's fees if it was so excessive as to shock the conscience. After reviewing the parties' supplemental briefing, the district court entered a minute order denying costs and fees, finding that the amount requested satisf[ies] the `shocks the conscience' test. The district court later entered a final written order denying costs and fees, again emphasizing the overall excessiveness of Mendez's request. This appeal followed.
The County does not dispute that Mendez was a prevailing plaintiff and, as such, would ordinarily be entitled to a reasonable attorney's fee. The jury found in Mendez's favor on three claims against five parties: her two constitutional claims of unreasonable search and false arrest against Reyes, and her state law claim of false arrest against Reyes, the County of San Bernardino, the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department and the City of Hesperia. Even a plaintiff who wins only nominal damages is considered a prevailing plaintiff under § 1988; Mendez won both nominal and punitive damages. See Farrar v. Hobby, 506 U.S. 103, 112, 113 S.Ct. 566, 121 L.Ed.2d 494 (1992). Although she did not prevail against all defendants or on all of her claims, it is well established that fail[ure] to recover on all theories of liability is not a bar to recovery of attorney's fees. Thomas, 410 F.3d at 649. A plaintiff is entitled to recover attorney's fees even for claims on which she did not prevail, if they involve a common core of facts or are based on related legal theories. Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). Nonetheless, the district court dispensed with the practice courts are generally required to follow when calculating attorney's fees in civil rights cases  i.e., computing a lodestar figure and then, if necessary, making adjustments to that figure based upon reasonableness factors, instead denying all costs and fees as excessive. Morales v. City of San Rafael, 96 F.3d 359, 362 (9th Cir.1996). Congress' intent in enacting § 1988 was to attract competent counsel to prosecute civil rights cases, where victims ordinarily cannot afford to purchase legal services at the rates set by the private market. City of Riverside v. Rivera, 477 U.S. 561, 576, 106 S.Ct. 2686, 91 L.Ed.2d 466 (1986) (plurality opinion). Therefore, a court's discretion to deny fees under § 1988 is very narrow and ... fee awards should be the rule rather than the exception. Herrington v. County of Sonoma, 883 F.2d 739, 743 (9th Cir.1989) (internal quotation marks omitted). The Supreme Court and we have thus denied a prevailing plaintiff an attorney's fee in only certain limited situations, none of which is applicable here. In Farrar, the Court held that a plaintiff who seeks a large damages award but wins only nominal damages, thus failing to prove an essential element of the relief sought, may reasonably be awarded no fees. 506 U.S. at 115, 113 S.Ct. 566. We have explained, however, that such a denial is appropriate only where the plaintiff's success is purely technical or de minimis.  Morales, 96 F.3d at 363 (internal quotation marks omitted). When, as here, the plaintiff wins punitive damages, the award of punitive damages alone is sufficient to take it out of the nominal category. Thomas, 410 F.3d at 648. The County does not contend that Mendez's victory falls within the de minimis exception recognized in Farrar. A court may also deny an attorney's fee to the prevailing plaintiff under § 1988 when special circumstances exist sufficient to render an award unjust. Thomas, 410 F.3d at 648. We evaluate whether special circumstances exist by asking whether (1) allowing attorney's fees would further the purposes of § 1988 and (2) whether the balance of equities favors or disfavors the denial of fees. Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). We have stressed that this exception applies only in unusual cases, however, such as when there is both a strong likelihood of success on the merits and a strong likelihood of a substantial judgment at the outset of the litigation, such that the purpose behind § 1988  ensuring that litigants with similar claims would not be dissuaded from bringing suit by the lack of availability of a fee award  is not implicated. Herrington, 883 F.2d at 745. We have firmly rejected the district court's authority to refuse a reasonable fee under the special circumstances exception simply because it believes it would result in a windfall to a plaintiff. Thomas, 410 F.3d at 648. Granting a windfall to plaintiffs was a concern echoed by Congress in enacting § 1988, but Congress balanced that concern against the need to attract competent counsel to prosecute civil rights cases. Id. The district court did not identify any special circumstances present here, and we see none. Mendez's suit involved precisely the kind of high-risk, low-reward constitutional claims that motivated Congress to enact § 1988. Even the district court remarked that it was unlikely that anyone was beating down the doors to take on Ms. Mendez's case. The district court itself did not purport to rely on the special circumstances exception, but instead denied Mendez's request for costs and fees solely on a legal standard that originates from outside this circuit: that a request for fees under § 1988 may be denied if it is outrageously excessive or inflated to an intolerable degree, see Brown, 612 F.2d at 1059, or so excessive it `shock[s] the conscience of the court,' see Scham, 148 F.3d at 557 (quoting Fair Housing Council v. Landow, 999 F.2d 92, 96 (4th Cir.1993)) (alterations in Scham ). As the district court acknowledged, this circuit has never held that a court has the discretion to deny an attorney's fee to a prevailing plaintiff under § 1988 solely because the court finds the fee request to be so excessive as to shock its conscience. We need not decide whether it would ever be appropriate for a court entirely to deny fees and costs under § 1988 purely on the excessiveness of the request, however, because those circumstances are not present here. Those courts of appeals that have upheld a denial of fees under the shocks the conscience test have done so only where the fee request appeared to have been made in bad faith, such as billing outrageous numbers of hours on simple matters, or where the plaintiff made no effort to eliminate hours spent on unsuccessful, unrelated claims. In the first category are cases such as Brown, where the Seventh Circuit denied all fees to an attorney who submitted a request for 800 hours of billable time, even though his work consisted of filing a six-page complaint and then simply awaiting the outcome of pending litigation in the Supreme Court that almost automatically ... disposed of the case. 612 F.2d at 1059. Similarly, in Scham, the Fifth Circuit upheld a total denial of fees where an attorney billed 936 hours for a case where discovery was limited, and there were no meetings of the parties or attorneys, no settlement negotiations, no mediation, no court appearances, and no trial. 148 F.3d at 558. The counsel in Scham was also a solo practitioner with one year of experience, who nonetheless requested $750 per hour for his time. Id. Therefore, in both of these cases, it was altogether improbable that any attorney could have reasonably expended such hours in good faith on matters so simple. Falling into the second category are cases such as Fair Housing Council, 999 F.2d 92, where the Fourth Circuit upheld a denial of fees to a prevailing plaintiff who made no effort to eliminate large numbers of hours spent on unsuccessful, unrelated claims. In that case, plaintiffs brought separate claims for housing discrimination and breach of contract, succeeding only on their breach of contract claim. See 999 F.2d at 95. Although the housing discrimination and contract claims were not related  and the discrimination claim was by far the more complex of the two to litigate  the plaintiffs nonetheless submitted a request for $537,113 in fees for the entire litigation, with billing entries that failed to allocate the fees attributable to each claim. Id. The First Circuit similarly upheld the denial of fees in Lewis v. Kendrick, 944 F.2d 949, 957-58 (1st Cir.1991), where plaintiffs achieved only minor success and yet made no reduction for claims that had no relation to the victorious claim. The Lewis case also appears to have fallen into (and thus anticipated) the Farrar exception to granting a fee award, because the First Circuit concluded that plaintiffs' $1,000 compensatory award for prevailing on a single claim  after having requested $300,000 in compensatory and punitive damages on multiple claims  constituted only a de minimis victory. Id. at 955. As explained above, Mendez's case does not come within the Farrar exception. Although the district court characterized Mendez's fee request as unreasonable, excessive, egregious, staggering and indefensible, there is no evidence that her fee request was either made in bad faith or contained excessive hours spent on unrelated claims. The County's own proposed lodestar calculation included almost the same number of billable hours as Mendez's request, an acknowledgment that this case involved considerable discovery and proceeded to a full trial. [1] The County suggested that Mendez's attorneys should be compensated at a significantly lower rate  approximately half of what Mendez requested  but the County did not deny that Mendez's attorneys typically charge their clients such amounts. Instead, the County simply argued that her attorneys should be compensated in line with civil rights attorneys and not their own usual hourly rate. Cf. Camacho v. Bridgeport Fin., Inc., 523 F.3d 973, 980-81 (9th Cir. 2008) (explaining that appropriate hourly rate is the prevailing hourly rate in the [court's district] for work that is similar to that performed in [the] case, by attorneys with the skill, experience and reputation comparable to the party's attorneys). Finally, Mendez's attorneys represented that they had eliminated hours spent on Mendez's unsuccessful, unrelated claims. Although the County identified a few hours that it believed were nonetheless related to these claims, there is nothing to suggest that Mendez failed to make a good-faith effort to eliminate unrelated hours. In her reply, Mendez also agreed to write off additional time and costs so as to reduce or eliminate any remaining disputes over the number of hours. Thus we see nothing in this request for fees and costs that would shock the conscience of the court, such as was present in cases like Scham, Brown, Lewis and Landow. The other reasons the district court offered in support of its decision likewise cannot justify denying fees entirely. The court emphasized first that the fee request was staggering in light of the issues prevailed upon at trial and the actual amount of damages recovered by Plaintiff. We give due weight to the court's first-hand assessment of the case and its dynamics, both legal and factual. Nonetheless, we have cautioned that the significance of civil rights suits should not be evaluated solely on the amount of damages obtained, because successful suits act as a deterrent to law enforcement and serve[ ] the public purpose of helping to protect [the plaintiff] and persons like him from being subjected to similar unlawful treatment in the future. Morales, 96 F.3d at 364-65. Even in a case where the [p]laintiff succeeded on only one of his many claims against Defendants, we held that the district court must nonetheless calculate a reasonable fee. Thomas, 410 F.3d at 649-50. The district court certainly has discretion to reduce an award to a plaintiff who achieved only partial or limited success. But [t]o deny an award of attorney's fees notwithstanding Plaintiff's clear victory on one of his claims for relief is an abuse of discretion: a reasonable fee ... is not no fee at all. Id. at 649. The district court also suggested that the denial of fees could be justified because of certain excessive hour and cost entries and because Mendez's counsel block-billed their time, thereby frustrating the Court's efforts to determine whether the fees were, in fact, reasonable. [2] Again, such billing practices are legitimate grounds for reducing or eliminating certain claimed hours, but not for denying all fees. See, e.g., Welch v. Met. Life Ins. Co., 480 F.3d 942, 948 (9th Cir.2007) (courts have discretion to reduce block-billed hours); Herrington, 883 F.2d at 747 (courts have discretion to eliminate hours attributable to duplication of effort). Even duplicative work, however, is not a justification for cutting a fee, unless the lawyer does unnecessarily duplicative work. Moreno v. City of Sacramento, No. 06-15021, 534 F.3d 1106, 1113 (9th Cir.2008). As noted above, Mendez and the County essentially agreed on the number of hours reasonably expended on the case. Nonetheless, the district court often emphasized the excessiveness of Mendez's fees and costs as initially recorded in the firm's billing records  which showed approximately $1.2 million in fees and $85,000 in costs  even though Mendez never actually requested these amounts but instead voluntarily reduced both fees and costs, ostensibly to account for inefficient work or disputable cost entries. [3] The district court thus appears to have penalized Mendez for alleged inefficiency, notwithstanding her attempt to write down hours and costs to account for those very inefficiencies. As for the block-billed time entries, it was fully appropriate for the court to reduce those claimed hours. See Welch, 480 F.3d at 948 (affirming court's discounting of block-billed hours because they may overstate the hours incurred and make it more difficult to determine how much time was spent on particular activities). As we have clarified since the district court was confronted with the fee request here, however, the use of block billing does not justify an across-the-board reduction or rejection of all hours. See id. On remand, the district court should determine a reasonable attorney's fee for Mendez utilizing the customary lodestar method. See, e.g., Morales, 96 F.3d at 363. The lodestar is the presumptively reasonable rate, which is reached by multiplying the number of hours reasonably expended by the prevailing party with a reasonable hourly rate, then making any adjustments as necessary to account for factors not already subsumed within the initial lodestar calculation. See id. ; see also Kerr v. Screen Extras Guild, Inc., 526 F.2d 67, 70 (9th Cir.1975) (explaining 12 factors that bear on the reasonableness of the fee). In so doing, the court may make the adjustments it finds are warranted based on the record before it. For example, the court must consider what constitutes a reasonable hourly rate for work performed in the relevant community by attorneys of similar skill, experience and reputation. See Camacho, 523 F.3d at 980-81; see also Herrington, 883 F.2d at 746 (noting that [a] reasonable hourly rate should reflect the cost of competent counsel in the field). The court may also reduce an award for attorney's fees for unnecessarily duplicative work, if the court provides a clear explanation that we can review as to why these hours were truly unnecessary. See Moreno, 534 F.3d 1106, 1113. At the same time, the district court is not only free but obligated to consider `the results obtained' by [Mendez], or the `extent of [her] success.' Morales, 96 F.3d at 364 (quoting Hensley, 461 U.S. at 436, 440, 103 S.Ct. 1933). We therefore vacate the district court's order denying Mendez all fees and costs and remand for a determination of a reasonable award, consistent with the principles we have explained.