Opinion ID: 1894771
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Did the trial court have jurisdiction to enter the attorney-fee award?

Text: We begin by addressing the Board's argument that the trial court lacked jurisdiction to enter the attorney-fee award. The Board points out that the trial court's February 6, 2001, order was styled as a Final Order and stated that it was issued after a final hearing on all pending matters. Although Waldrop's request for attorney fees was pending when the trial court issued the order, the order neither addressed Waldrop's request for attorney fees [2] nor reserved that issue for later consideration. The Board asserts that the trial court's final order, through its silence, implicitly denied Waldrop's request for attorney fees and thus disposed of all claims. The Board further asserts that, in order to place that issue before the trial court again, Waldrop should have requested, pursuant to Rule 59, Ala. R. Civ. P., that the trial court alter, amend, or vacate the February 6, 2001, order as to the issue of attorney fees. Although Waldrop filed a Rule 59 motion, he did not raise the attorney-fee issue in that motion. Thus, the Board asserts, 30 days after the entry of the February 6, 2001, order, the trial court lost jurisdiction to reconsider its denial of attorney fees. Waldrop responds by arguing that the February 6, 2001, order was not a final order because, he says, the order did not dispose of all claims (i.e., the trial court did not address his pending request for attorney fees) and the trial court did not specifically direct that a final judgment be entered on less than all claims, pursuant to Rule 54(b), Ala. R. Civ. P. Waldrop asserts that the trial court's September 6, 2001, order is the final, and therefore appealable, order. The trial court agreed with Waldrop. At the August 13, 2001, hearing on Waldrop's request for attorney fees, the trial judge insisted that his February 6, 2001, order was not a final order, and, when confronted with the fact that that order was captioned Final Order, he emphatically denied that he intended it to be a final order at that time. The trial judge stated: My final order was going to be after we cleared up this issue of attorneys' fees. I can tell you that right now. And if I did that [called the February 6, 2001, order a final order], that was inadvertently done; if I said final order. Why would I say final order and leave the attorneys' fees out there hanging? ... I didn't intend to do it. That was not my intent. We begin our analysis of the jurisdictional issue by recognizing that a decision on the merits disposing of all claims is a final decision from which an appeal must be timely taken, whether a request for attorney fees remains for adjudication. Budinich v. Becton Dickinson & Co., 486 U.S. 196, 199-200, 108 S.Ct. 1717, 100 L.Ed.2d 178 (1988). Indeed, this Court has already concluded that the February 6, 2001, order entered in this case was a final decision on the merits. When the Board filed this appeal, Waldrop filed a cross-appeal. In that cross-appeal, Waldrop challenged the correctness of that portion of the trial court's February 6, 2001, order refusing to award damages against the Board. The Board moved to dismiss Waldrop's cross-appeal, asserting that because Waldrop's notice of cross-appeal was not filed within 42 days of the entry of the judgment he was appealing from, i.e., the judgment entered on February 6, 2001, Waldrop's appeal from that decision was untimely. We agreed, and on December 19, 2001, we dismissed Waldrop's cross-appeal. We reached this conclusion even though the trial court had not entered a Rule 54(b) certification stating that the February 6, 2001, order was a final order. Thus, this Court has already concluded that the February 6, 2001, order was a final, appealable order. This fact, however, does not completely resolve the issue whether a trial court after it has issued a final order on the merits and awarded costsmay consider a request for attorney fees, where the attorney-fee issue was pending at the time the case was decided on the merits but was not expressly reserved for later consideration. Although the trial court labeled its February 6, 2001, order as a Final Order, the trial court subsequently announced that it did not intend to issue a final order until after the issue of attorney fees was cleared up. These comments by the trial judge could be interpreted as a nunc pro tunc amendment of its judgment; if that is the case, the trial court was not divested of jurisdiction when it issued its order awarding attorney fees. Additionally, in light of the record before us, we will not interpret the trial court's silence in its February 6, 2001, order as to Waldrop's request for attorney fees as a denial of that request. However, we note that, under different circumstances, a trial court's silence might be construed as a denial of a pending request. See, e.g., Lambert v. Lisanti Foods, Inc., 624 So.2d 625 (Ala.Civ.App.1993) (the trial court's judgment, which was silent as to the plaintiff's claim alleging retaliatory discharge, was taken to be a denial or rejection of that claim). Because we are inclined to reach the merits of the issue whether the trial court properly awarded attorney fees, we are unprepared to dispose of this case on the murky issue whether the trial court lacked jurisdiction to enter its September 6, 2001, order awarding attorney fees. We therefore address the issue whether Waldrop's lawsuit resulted in a common benefit.