Opinion ID: 199377
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Commonwealth's Rejoinder.

Text: 34 We address the Commonwealth's main arguments seriatim. Its other points are insufficiently developed, patently wrong, or both. We reject them without editorial comment. 35 1. Proportionality. We need not tarry over the Commonwealth's assertion that the award is disproportionate to the degree of the plaintiffs' success. While degree of success is critical in determining the amount of a fee award, Tex. State Teachers, 489 U.S. at 790, proportionality is no longer an issue once the prevailing party has separated the wheat from the chaff (i.e., isolated the time spent on her successful claim or claims). See Hensley, 461 U.S. at 434-35. Because the plaintiffs here have limited their fee petition to the solitary claim on which they prevailed completely, proportionality is no longer critical. 6 See City of Riverside, 477 U.S. at 574. The real question is to what extent the method of calculation, the claimed hours and rates, and the associated documentation project a reasonable fee. 36 2. Time Records. The Commonwealth next complains that the very basis of the lower court's calculation is faulty because the plaintiffs neglected to produce contemporaneous time records. Without drawing our attention to any specific deficiencies in the records presented, the Commonwealth argues that the lower court erroneously accepted shorthand summary compilations. 37 The facts are these. The plaintiffs provided the district court with four accounts - one for each lawyer - that synthesized, excerpted, and reproduced entries from the lawyers' original time sheets. The plaintiffs followed this praxis in an apparent effort both to segregate time spent on unsuccessful, unrelated claims and to create a more intelligible format for judicial consideration of their requests. 38 The district court welcomed these submissions and elected not to require the plaintiffs to produce the original time sheets. We discern no error. Our cases make clear that prevailing parties who intend to seek counsel fee awards ordinarily must ensure that contemporaneous time records are kept in reasonable detail. E.g., Lipsett, 975 F.2d at 938; Grendel's Den, 749 F.2d at 952. These precedents warn that failure to do so may have deleterious consequences (such as the slashing or disallowance of an award). Lipsett, 975 F.2d at 938; Grendel's Den, 749 F.2d at 952. Here, however, the plaintiffs satisfied that obligation: each of the four attorneys filed an affidavit attesting that she kept contemporaneous time records. The fact that counsel, in helping to prepare the fee application, transcribed the notations on their time sheets verbatim and, for ease in reference, incorporated the transcriptions in compilations, did not compromise the integrity of their billing records. After all, the compilations simplified matters and enabled the lower court more easily to assess the merits of the parties' conflicting contentions. If the Commonwealth doubted whether the compilations faithfully tracked the time sheets, it could have filed a discovery request for the original records. Having eschewed that course, it cannot now be heard to complain that the judge, who expressed satisfaction with the accuracy and adequacy of the plaintiffs' proffer, did not demand to see the raw data. 39 3. Overstaffing. The Commonwealth maintains that the plaintiffs overstaffed the litigation, drawing on a battery of lawyers when one would have sufficed. Such a claim brings certain general rules into play. We briefly rehearse those rules. 40 On the one hand, awards under the Fees Act are not intended to serve as full employment or continuing education programs for lawyers and paralegals. Lipsett, 975 F.2d at 938. In that spirit, a court should not hesitate to discount hours if it sees signs that a prevailing party has overstaffed a case. See Hart v. Bourque, 798 F.2d 519, 523 (1st Cir. 1986). On the other hand, courts must be careful not to throw out the baby with the bath water. Given the complexity of modern litigation, the deployment of multiple attorneys is sometimes an eminently reasonable tactic. Consequently, the mere fact that more than one lawyer toils on the same general task does not necessarily constitute excessive staffing. Rodriguez-Hernandez v. Miranda-Velez, 132 F.3d 848, 860 (1st Cir. 1998). Effective preparation and presentation of a case often involve the kind of collaboration that only occurs when several attorneys are working on a single issue. Id. 41 The Commonwealth argues that the central legal question here - the constitutionality of Regulation 29 - was pedestrian, and that the engagement of multiple counsel therefore was unwarranted. But it is too much of a stretch to say that the First Amendment issue here was, in the Commonwealth's pat phrase, simple and straightforward. The Commonwealth's conclusion seems particularly dubious when one factors into the mix the ancillary issue of standing (a knotty problem, on these facts). See supra note 5. 42 The ferocity of the Commonwealth's defense likewise undermines its assertion that the plaintiffs did not need to call up the reserves in order to litigate the Regulation 29 issue. Although the Commonwealth now claims that it never particularly cared about the fate of the supposedly unused regulation, it certainly did not display any such indifference in the district court. To the contrary, it mounted a Stalingrad defense of Regulation 29, battling from rock to rock and tree to tree. After setting such a militant tone and forcing the plaintiffs to respond in kind, it seems disingenuous for the Commonwealth to castigate the plaintiffs for putting too many troops into the field. Cf. City of Riverside, 477 U.S. at 581 n.11 (The government cannot litigate tenaciously and then be heard to complain about the time necessarily spent by the plaintiff in response.) (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). 43 Even so, we remain skeptical about the use of four attorneys to litigate a single claim - particularly a claim that did not necessitate a trial. Where tag teams of attorneys are involved, fee applications should be scrutinized with especial care. Moreover, the level of scrutiny should increase in direct proportion to the number of lawyers employed. Despite these concerns, however, three things make us reluctant to interfere with the trial court's considered judgment in the peculiar circumstances of this case. 44 First, the trial judge had the best coign of vantage. He was uniquely positioned to weigh the parties' staffing needs, assess the reasonableness of their handling of the case, and evaluate the quality and relevance of the services rendered. Second, the judge explained his reasoning for allowing fees for multiple attorneys in meticulous detail. Third, the attorneys' proffer to the district court persuasively described their division of responsibility and their need for teamwork. Considering these and other factors, we conclude - although the question is close - that the court below did not abuse its discretion in determining that it was reasonable for the plaintiffs to have entrusted the Regulation 29 claim to a quartet of attorneys. 45 4. Overlapping Issues. When a plaintiff prevails on some, but not all, of multiple claims, a fee reduction may be in order. Hensley, 461 U.S. at 434-35; Coutin, 124 F.3d at 339-40. In such a situation, the court must filter out the time spent on unsuccessful claims and award the prevailing party fees related solely to time spent litigating the winning claim(s). 7 Hensley, 461 U.S. at 435. On appeal, the Commonwealth assails the district court's handling of the time spent by the various attorneys on overlapping matters, i.e., issues involving both Regulation 29 and other claims on which the plaintiffs did not triumph. The Commonwealth's most powerful argument highlights a patent inconsistency in the trial court's otherwise exemplary rescript. We trace the origins of this inconsistency. 46 In this case, the plaintiffs, mindful of the Hensley Court's directive that [c]counsel for the prevailing party should make a good-faith effort to exclude from a fee request hours that are excessive, redundant, or otherwise unnecessary, 461 U.S. at 434, limited their application to time spent on their one winning claim, allocating to that quest a portion of the hours spent on overlapping matters. In scrutinizing the plaintiffs' submissions, the district court noted the way in which their attorneys had handled the vexing problem of how to account for time spent on overlapping claims. The court commended the methodology employed, declared that twenty-five percent of the overlapping time constituted a reasonable allocation for the Regulation 29 claim, and proceeded to fashion the fee award (with other changes, as described supra). 47 The fly in the ointment is that the court's computations did not track its statements: while the court awarded only twenty-five percent of the overlapping hours spent by two of the attorneys (Berkan and Meenan), it inadvertently awarded eighty percent of the overlapping time spent by the other two lawyers (Harlow and Goldberg). Because the court, to that extent, abandoned sub silentio its announced twenty-five percent formula, we think that a correction should be made. 48 We have several options at this point. We could, of course, remand for a new calculation. E.g., Coutin, 124 F.3d at 342. But remand is not obligatory, e.g., Lipsett, 975 F.2d at 943, and the court below was clear as to what it intended. Because the record is sufficiently explicit that we can perform the necessary calculations and implement the district court's stated plan, it would be wasteful to remand and invite a new round of litigation. Cf. Hensley, 461 U.S. at 437 (warning courts against turning fee applications into major satellite litigation). Thus, we forgo a remand and reduce Harlow's and Goldberg's hours to include only twenty-five percent of the time spent by each of them on overlapping matters. 49 The majority of Harlow's allowed time - 116.5 hours - fell into this category. She included eighty percent of this time in her calculations. The district court adopted this figure. We enforce the court's twenty-five percent limitation by trimming that number from 93.2 hours to 29.125 hours. The net effect of this reduction is to decrease the overall award in regard to Harlow's services from $29,628 to $14,250. 50 We follow the same approach vis-a-vis Goldberg. She spent 183.75 hours on overlapping matters, and included 147 of those hours in her materials. The court adopted that figure. We enforce the court's twenty-five percent limitation by lowering that number to 45.9375 hours. The net effect of this reduction is to shrink the overall award in regard to Goldberg's services from $100,020 to $75,765.