Opinion ID: 761225
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Billing Judgment

Text: 9 The district court began its fee analysis by engaging in just such a lodestar calculation. It specifically found Attorney Golden's rate of $225/hour to be reasonable in light of her skill and experience. The court also explicitly chose not to exclude time spent on Quaratino's unsuccessful pregnancy discrimination claim, finding that it was sufficiently related to the successful retaliation claim that the amount of time expended on the successful claim would not have been substantially less if that claim was the only one alleged. Quaratino II, 948 F.Supp. at 333. The court did disallow time spent on Quaratino's unsuccessful motion for a new trial on the discrimination claim, but made no findings of excessive or unnecessary billing. As a result, the district court arrived at a lodestar amount of $124,645.18 5 --but declined to award it. See id. at 336. 10 Following an extended inquiry into the state of the law and the attributes of a preferred approach to fee awards, Judge Martin instead decided to award attorney's fees of exactly one-half of the plaintiff's $158,145 recovery at trial. He asserted that it is far from clear how the Circuit Court would resolve the fee question presented here. Id. at 333. 11 In the face of this perceived uncertainty, the district court elected to craft what it termed a billing judgment approach. Under that approach, which the district court derived in part from the dissenting opinion of Justice Rehnquist in City of Riverside v. Rivera, 477 U.S. 561, 591-94, 106 S.Ct. 2686, 91 L.Ed.2d 466 (1986), an attorney's requested fee would be judged reasonable if it were rationally related to the monetary recovery that the attorney could have anticipated ex ante. The district court would have had Quaratino's attorney estimate ex ante the total possible financial recovery in the case (the court forecast a very generous maximum of $200,000), discount that amount for the substantial risk of no recovery, and proceed to expend time on the case only up to the time value of an appropriate fraction of that expected recovery. See Quaratino II, 948 F.Supp. at 338. The validity of the attorney's ex ante predictions and ensuing expenditure of time would then be evaluated ex post by the district court to set a reasonable attorney's fee award. 12 Even setting aside considerable misgivings as to the feasibility of such precise ex ante calculations, we find that this approach conflicts with the legislative intent and rationales of the fee-shifting statute. Congress enacted fee-shifting in civil rights litigation precisely because the expected monetary recovery in many cases was too small to attract effective legal representation. See Rivera, 477 U.S. at 575, 106 S.Ct. 2686 (plurality opinion) (Congress did not intend for fees in civil rights cases ... to depend on obtaining substantial monetary relief.). Were we to adopt the billing judgment approach that the district court advocates, we would contravene that clear legislative intent by relinking the effectiveness of a civil rights plaintiff's legal representation solely to the dollar value of her claim. 6 As a near-unanimous Supreme Court reiterated in Blanchard v. Bergeron, 489 U.S. 87, 109 S.Ct. 939, 103 L.Ed.2d 67 (1989), a civil rights plaintiff seeks to vindicate important civil and constitutional rights that cannot be valued solely in monetary terms, id. at 96, 109 S.Ct. 939 (quoting Rivera, 477 U.S. at 574, 106 S.Ct. 2686), and we are unwilling to hold that the plaintiff's attorney should calculate the value of her client's rights in just those monetary terms. 13 Nor is the district court's approach saved by its proposed exception, which would allow fees out of line with monetary recovery in a case where a new legal principle of importance in the field of civil rights or an issue[ ] ... of overarching societal importance is involved. Quaratino II, 948 F.Supp. at 337. Congress enacted fee-shifting statutes to compensate private attorney[s] general and thereby to encourage private enforcement of civil rights statutes, to the benefit of the public as a whole. See H.R.Rep. No. 94-1558, at 2 (1976) (citing Newman v. Piggie Park Enters., Inc., 390 U.S. 400, 402, 88 S.Ct. 964, 19 L.Ed.2d 1263 (1968) (per curiam)); see generally S.Rep. No. 94-1011 (1976). 7 The public interest in private civil rights enforcement is not limited to those cases that push the legal envelope; it is perhaps most meaningfully served by the day-to-day private enforcement of these rights, which secures compliance and deters future violations. Congress meant reasonable attorney's fees to be available to the private attorneys general who enforce the law, see generally S.Rep. No. 94-1011, not only to those whose cases make new law. 14 The most direct response to the district court's fee calculation innovation, however, is that this Court does not follow, and has not suggested that it would be inclined to follow, the billing judgment rule that the district court developed. We believe that lodestar analysis, as developed and refined in the decade and a half of jurisprudence beginning with Hensley, is a flexible mechanism within whose parameters district courts should calculate the prevailing plaintiff's reasonable fee. We decline the district court's invitation to abandon that framework in favor of a billing judgment rule. 15 Apparently recognizing these weaknesses in the district court's approach, Tiffany puts itself in the awkward position of trying to defend the court's low fee award, but on grounds that differ from, and in fact contradict, the court's own analysis. Tiffany does not press the billing judgment rule on appeal. Instead it argues that the $79,000 award should be treated as if it represented a decision by the district court to reduce the lodestar amount for lack of success on Quaratino's pregnancy discrimination claim. In particular, Tiffany argues that the district court could have reduced the lodestar to as little as $38,918.96 by excluding all of Quaratino's attorney's time spent on the unsuccessful discrimination claim, 8 and that as a result, the court's actual award of $79,000 does not constitute a reversible abuse of discretion. Unfortunately for Tiffany, the district court did not arrive at its $79,000 award by subtracting the value of time spent on unsuccessful claims from the lodestar. Instead, the court reached that figure by abandoning lodestar analysis altogether in favor of a billing judgment rule. Moreover, Tiffany's argument in support of the court's award depends on the severability of Quaratino's unsuccessful pregnancy discrimination claim from the successful retaliation claim--a characterization that is directly at odds with the court's own explicit finding that the claims were intertwined, Quaratino II, 948 F.Supp. at 333, 336. In any event, we decline to engage in any of these hypothetical lodestar calculations and determinations. Instead, we restrict our analysis to the reasoning in fact employed by the district court in reaching its fee award--billing judgment--and, having found it flawed, remand for the award of a fee based on the actual lodestar. 9 16