Opinion ID: 446516
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: contract, fraud and unreasonable fees

Text: 3 Under Rule 56 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, summary judgment is to be ordered only if there is no genuine issue as to any material fact. Any doubt is to be resolved against the moving party. Abraham v. Graphic Arts International Union, 660 F.2d 811, 814 (D.C.Cir.1981). Still, a party opposing summary judgment may not simply rest on its pleadings; it must offer some support for its version of the facts. Fed.R.Civ.P. 56(e). 4 Newcomb bases much of its defense, as well as its counterclaims for fraud and unreasonable fees, on its contention that Popham Haik overbilled by charging for hours that either were not worked or were largely wasted. To support this claim, Newcomb submitted discovery answers from Popham Haik and an offer of expert testimony concerning the amount of time various tasks performed by the firm could reasonably have required. Those submissions may well have fallen short of clear and convincing proof, but they certainly sufficed to create a genuine factual issue material both to Popham Haik's contract claim and to Newcomb's counterclaims for fraud and unreasonable fees. 5 The evidentiary value of Popham Haik's discovery responses lies in their apparent inconsistency with internal firm records used to prepare Newcomb's bills. In interrogatories, Newcomb asked Popham Haik how much time attorneys at the firm spent preparing fifty-four documents listed in the complaint as examples of work done for Newcomb. Popham Haik at first balked at the request, arguing that the internal billing records it had already disclosed enabled Newcomb to answer the interrogatories as easily as the firm. App. 55. The firm complied with a subsequent court order to provide as complete an answer as now possible to the interrogatories, App. 62, but it qualified its response by noting that the nature of its billing records limited the precision with which time could be allocated to particular tasks. 6 Newcomb later deposed Charles Seeger, a senior attorney at Popham Haik, regarding the firm's answers to Newcomb's interrogatories. Seeger testified that he had spent over fifteen hours preparing the answers from the internal billing records, and he expressed confidence that the firm had not underestimated the time devoted to the documents. For example, Popham Haik had allocated four hours to documents collectively identified in the interrogatories as item R, which included [m]emorandum or documents relating to discussions of Amendments to Newcomb Arbitrage Fund I, efforts with First Bank of Michigan regarding the Pool Offering, change in fee structure of the Fund, amendments to the Limited Partnership Agreement, and the Customer Agreement between Bank of New York and Newcomb Commodities Corporation. App. 47-48. When deposed about these documents, Seeger emphatically rejected the suggestion that the interrogatory answers might have omitted some of the hours that the firm's billing records allotted to item R: 7 Q: Is it possible that in addition to the entries that you so identified, there are a great many more entries which you were unable to identify just because of the ambiguity of the words used, and so you may have put in a great deal more than four hours simply on the amendments to the limited partnership agreement alone? 8