Opinion ID: 203277
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Global Reduction.

Text: Even though vacation of the fee award is in order, see supra Part II(A), we are mindful that the plaintiffs have contested the global reduction essayed by the district court in calculating the lodestar. When reallocating the responsibility for payment of the award, the district court will once again have to begin with its extant lodestar computation (which includes the fifteen percent global reduction). Thus, it behooves us to resolve this contretemps here and now. The lower court explained that many of the time entries logged by the plaintiffs' attorneys failed adequately to describe the tasks for which the time was expended. Torres-Rivera II, 2007 WL 906176, at . This impeded the court's ability to evaluate the utility of those hours. Id. at . To compensate, the court treated the offending entries as block billing and reduced the fee request by fifteen percent. Id. at -2. The plaintiffs challenge this global reduction. This assignment of error engenders abuse of discretion review. See, e.g., Gay Officers, 247 F.3d at 292-93. Attorneys' time records, submitted in support of fee requests, often contain questionable entries, and the district court's discretion in separating wheat from chaff is quite broad. See id. at 295-96; Lipsett, 975 F.2d at 937. Nothing in the record conduces to the view that the district court abused its discretion in effecting the global reduction at issue here. The judge had managed the case for several years and had presided over the trial. She was intimately familiar with the nuances of the litigation. She canvassed the time records and provided a plausible rationale for her binary decision to discount generic time entries and to shrink the overall award. No more was exigible. The prevailing party has the burden of proving the reasonableness of the hours claimed. See Hensley, 461 U.S. at 433, 103 S.Ct. 1933. Where that party furnishes time records that are ill-suited for evaluative purposes, the court is hampered in ascertaining whether those hours were excessive, redundant, or spent on irrelevant issues. See Tenn. Gas Pipeline, 32 F.3d at 634. In such a circumstance, the court may adjust those entries to achieve an equitable result. See id.; Grendel's Den, 749 F.2d at 951-52. To be sure, the district court's discretion in this regard is not unbounded. Here, however, the court's description of the entries as generic appears apt. Moreover, the court sensibly explained what it was doing and why it felt impelled to make the adjustment. Our case law has acknowledged that in the fee-shifting milieu reasonableness is not an absolute but a range. See, e.g., Metro. Dist. Comm'n, 847 F.2d at 17. On this record, the decision to make the fifteen percent global reduction plainly falls within the range of reasonableness.