Opinion ID: 157110
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Use of block-billing.

Text: 38 In its decision, the district court quite appropriately expressed concern about the use of block billing practices. 9 The use of billing practices that camouflage the work a lawyer does naturally and quite correctly raise suspicions about whether all the work claimed was actually accomplished or whether it was necessary. This concern is particularly important in a situation where a party is seeking to have his opponent pay for his own lawyer's work. As we noted in Jane L., a district court does not abuse its discretion in reducing a plaintiff's fee request when the request is based on time records that are rather sloppy and imprecise. Jane L., 61 F.3d at 1510. We have always required lawyers to keep meticulous time records that 'reveal ... all hours for which compensation is requested and how those hours were allotted to specific tasks.'  Id. (quoting Ramos, 713 F.2d at 553). 39 In this case, however, the record before us demonstrates that the district court clearly erred when it found that the plaintiffs' lawyer had engaged in block billing. In their initial application for attorney's fees, the plaintiffs submitted billing statements from their lawyer that itemized what tasks he performed in the case on each day, with a total amount of time billed for each day. The summaries of the tasks are quite specific, and they go beyond the kind of imprecision we criticized in Jane L. It is true, however, that these billing statements do not allocate the precise amounts of time spent on each particular task during each individual day. However, in their response to the defendants' objection to the fee request, the plaintiffs supplemented these billing statements with copies of the actual contemporaneous time slips that were the basis of the billing statements. These time slips do include the specific amounts of time allocated to each individual task. 40 On the basis of these records, it is clear that the plaintiffs' lawyer did not engage in block billing. If the district court is concerned about identifying certain tasks that it felt were redundant or unnecessary, it had information sufficient to calculate how much time was spent on those tasks. Thus, the court's contention that it was not possible to identify which hours were excessive or duplicative 10 is not supported by the record. On the other hand, the district court might properly be concerned about the difficulty of performing a meaningful analysis given the mass of records submitted to it. On remand, the district court may quite properly impose on the claimant the burden of organizing or summarizing the billing records in such a manner as to facilitate judicial review of the reasonableness of the claim for attorneys' fees. 11 41