Opinion ID: 1143264
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: (2a) The Legislature incorporated into section 3856 the principle of apportionment of attorney's fees.

Text: All parties agree that the predecessor to the present statute required the courts to apportion attorney's fees between the worker (the active litigant) and the employer (the passive beneficiary of his action). This predecessor statute read, in relevant part: where the employer has failed to join in said action [against the negligent third party] and to be represented therein by his own attorney, or where the employer has not made arrangements with the employee's attorney to represent him in said action, the court shall fix a reasonable attorney's fee, which shall be fixed as a share of the amount actually received by the employer, to be paid to the employee's attorney on account of the service rendered by him in effecting recovery for the benefit of the employer, which said fee shall be deducted from any amounts due to the employer. (Stats. 1949, ch. 120, § 2, pp. 355-356; italics added.) The statute left unclear, however, the priority rights as between the worker's attorney and the employer in case the recovery should not suffice both to compensate the attorney and to recompense the employer for his workers' compensation outlay. To remedy this obscurity the Legislature enacted the current statute, which, with an evident eye to the problem of conflicting priorities, specifies that the court shall first order paid from any judgment the attorney's fee. The statute then goes on to repeat, in substantially similar terms, the language emphasized in the 1949 statute: the court is to order the payment of  a reasonable attorney's fee which shall be based solely upon the services rendered by the employee's attorney in effecting recovery both for the benefit of the employee and the employer.  (§ 3856, subd. (b); italics added.) The Legislature thus incorporated into its statute the equitable doctrine described above; it required a passive beneficiary of a recovery to contribute to the expenses of litigation in creating that fund in proportion to his benefit therefrom. Using much of the same language as the 1949 statute, the Legislature then refined and extended its intention that the employer contribute his reasonable share toward the attorney's fee of the worker whose efforts benefit the employer. In the present statute the Legislature continues its mandate to the courts to apportion reasonable attorneys' fees on the basis of benefit to the respective parties, while assuring the worker that he can obtain an attorney by guaranteeing that attorney priority in the event that the judgment recovered should not suffice both to recompense him and to satisfy the employer's claim. The statute as now framed commands the court to establish a reasonable attorney's fee taking into account the services rendered both for the benefit of the employee and the employer. Such language, far from forbidding the application of the equitable principle of reasonable apportionment, requires it. (Cf. Witt v. Jackson (1961) 57 Cal.2d 57, 72 [17 Cal. Rptr. 369, 366 P.2d 641].) Both the directive to assess a reasonable fee and the mandate to consider the benefit to both active and passive beneficiaries of the recovery call for apportionment. Moreover, this consideration of the language of the statute finds support in the general canons of construction applicable to workers' compensation legislation. The Legislature set forth the governing principle of statutory construction in section 3202, which instructs the courts to construe the entire Workers' Compensation Act with the purpose of extending their benefits for the protection of persons injured in the course of their employment. This clause requires the courts to view the legislation from the standpoint of the injured worker, with the objective of securing for him the maximum benefits to which he is entitled. Thus, in a case in which the worker might well stand entitled to contribution toward his attorney's fee absent any statutory provision, this court cannot interpret a statute which on its face calls for the weighing of benefits and burdens, as barring apportionment of fees. Such an interpretation would violate the legislative intent that we liberally construe workers' compensation statutes to the worker's benefit. Indeed, to construe the statute as forbidding apportionment of fees would raise questions of conflict with the policy announced in section 3751, which makes it a misdemeanor for an employer to require from a worker any contribution either directly or indirectly to cover the cost of compensation benefits. One of the costs of compensation benefits is the cost of recovering judgments against third parties whose negligence necessitated the payment of those compensation benefits. To construe section 3856 as a legislative demand that the courts assist in precisely such an enforced contribution is therefore to negate the legislative intent underlying section 3751. By incorporating into the words of the statute the precepts of equity requiring a passive beneficiary to recompense his actively litigating benefactor, the Legislature has directed our courts to apportion fees in relation to benefits; that the Legislature fully intended this result is a conclusion which emerges from the history of the statute in question.