Opinion ID: 70645
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Calculating Attorney's Fees

Text: 42 Last, Caban-Wheeler argues that the District Court erred in calculating the amount she is entitled to in attorney's fees. The District Court found plaintiff's requested rate of two hundred dollars an hour to be reasonable. The court then ruled that the 96.3 hours spent through the first trial and appeal were reasonable, but the additional 291.75 hours (excluding specific hours spent on the Title VII claim) were not reasonable because those hours include time spent on trial preparation or in trial, and so reflect time spent on two distinct and unsuccessful claims. In addition, the court found it unreasonable that the attorneys spent seventy three hours reviewing trial transcripts and trial exhibits. For those reasons, the court ruled that a total of 196.30 hours were reasonably spent on this case. 43 Caban-Wheeler argues that she had already excluded time spent on the Title VII claim, and so the trial court double deducted those hours; moreover, no time should be deducted for the unsuccessful substantive due process claim because she had already deducted over two hundred hours from the total time spent on the due process issues and because she would have spent just as much time preparing for the successful procedural due process claim even without the substantive due process claim. In addition, Caban-Wheeler argues that the court simply miscounted how much time was spent on the first trial and first appeal; instead of 96.3, counsel spent 309.75. Lastly, Caban-Wheeler disputes the court's ruling that only one hundred hours was reasonable for time spent after the successful appeal, especially considering that the second trial itself took seventy-three hours. 44 The District Court may have double deducted the Title VII time 7 and may have miscounted how much time was spent on the first trial and the first appeal, 8 so we remand for a more thorough examination of these issues.