Opinion ID: 156986
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: Hours Billed Researching and Drafting Motions on Attorney's Fees

Text: 48 An award of reasonable attorneys' fees may include compensation for work performed in preparing and presenting the fee application. Mares, 801 F.2d at 1205; and see Glass v. Pfeffer, 849 F.2d 1261, 1266 n. 3 (10th Cir.1988); Hernandez v. George, 793 F.2d 264, 269 (10th Cir.1986). However, the district court refused to reimburse appellants for any [t]ime spent conducting research and drafting motions pertaining to attorney fee recovery because the time submitted by [appellants] for post-trial work is excessive. Aplts' App. vol. VII, at 2305. 49 At least four circuits have held that when a party submits a § 1988 attorney's fee request that is outrageously excessive, the court may respond by awarding no fees at all. See Environmental Defense Fund, Inc. v. Reilly, 1 F.3d 1254, 1258-60 (D.C.Cir.1993); Fair Housing Council v. Landow, 999 F.2d 92, 96-97 (4th Cir.1993); Lewis v. Kendrick, 944 F.2d 949, 958 (1st Cir.1991); Brown v. Stackler, 612 F.2d 1057, 1059 (7th Cir.1980). The reason for acting punitively when a party asks for fees that are outrageously excessive is to deter attorneys from mak[ing] unreasonable demands, knowing that the only unfavorable consequence of such misconduct would be reduction of their fee to what they should have asked for in the first place. Stackler, 612 F.2d at 1059. 50 We do not need to decide whether to adopt this rule because it is not applicable here. We have reviewed the appellants' post-trial billings, including those attributable to their fee request, and find that they cannot be characterized as obviously inflated to an intolerable degree, id., and thus warranting a punitive sanction. Appellants spent roughly eighty hours preparing their fee request. See Aplts' App. vol. VI, at 2047-50, 2073-77 (billing entries describing work on fee request). The eighty hours were used to write a twenty-five page memorandum in support of their motion for attorney's fees, prepare seven lengthy attorney affidavits, copy four cases from Westlaw for submission to the district court, and compile almost 200 pages of raw billing statements and twenty-eight pages of descriptions of various billing deductions for media-related activities and unsuccessful claims. In toto, the fee request and supporting documents were almost 400 pages long. It would be inappropriate to conclude that spending eighty hours on a fee request of this magnitude is outrageously unreasonable or excessive. Therefore, we conclude that the district court's complete denial of time spent preparing the fee request was an abuse of discretion. On remand, the district court should award appellants a reasonable number of hours for their work on the attorney's fee application. 51