Opinion ID: 156986
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Hours Billed by Ms. Heins of the ACLU

Text: 28 The district court rejected all fees attributable to Ms. Heins, an ACLU attorney whom the appellants consulted, because she neither entered an appearance before th[e] court nor attended any pre-trial hearing or deposition. Aplts' App. vol. VII, at 2304. On appeal, the appellants argue this was error and allege that Ms. Heins did enter an appearance before the district court. 29 We do not think that whether Ms. Heins entered an appearance is the relevant question. Fees for legal assistants are properly awarded as attorney's fees, although they do not appear before the court. Additionally, we can easily contemplate a scenario in which a junior associate spends hours of appropriately billable time on litigation yet remains unknown to the court. Finally, requiring an attorney to enter an appearance before becoming eligible for fees could lead to the strange result pointed out by appellants that if [Ms. Heins] unnecessarily had flown from New York to attend hearings and assist in depositions, [the district court] might have considered her other work legitimate. Aplts' Opening Br. at 33. 30 Although our cases do not require an entry of appearance in order for the court to grant compensation, the district court's conclusion to award no fee to Ms. Heins was not an abuse of discretion. The appellants are not entitled to reimbursement for Ms. Heins's hours because they have failed to establish that her work was reasonably necessary to their case and because her billing statements are not clear. If an attorney is consulting on a case, the assistance provided must be actually necessary or essential to proper representation rather than merely comforting or helpful. See Mares, 801 F.2d at 1206. The entries on Ms. Heins's billing records do not disclose any assistance, expert or otherwise, which was actually necessary to plaintiffs' case. Id. Almost all of Ms. Heins's billing entries are for telephone calls with the appellants or for review of documents. See Aplts' App. vol. VI, doc. D1. None of the billing entries describe the subject matter of the telephone conversations or the documents she was reviewing, and the few entries that suggest she generated original work product are too conclusory to merit a fee award. See Jane L., 61 F.3d at 1510. For instance, on April 10, 1995, there is an entry which reads, in its entirety, memo for .3 hours. Similarly, on May 8, 1995, the entry reads research for one hour. On the tenth of that same month, the entry is draft outline for one hour. These excerpted billing entries are representative and provide less detail than is required in a billing statement submitted for an award of fees for original work product, see id., or an award of fees for work product actually necessary to the appellants' case, see Mares, 801 F.2d at 1205-06. Finally, as the defendants point out, if Ms. Heins's contributions had been essential, one would expect the appellants' billings to have been significantly reduced. They were not. The district court did not err in disallowing Ms. Heins's submitted time because her records were imprecise and because the billing records do not show that her assistance was necessary to the case. 31