Opinion ID: 1037025
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Reduction in Fees

Text: Consumers next argues that Waldo’s fee award should have been reduced based on her partial success, because she succeeded on only one of the seven claims asserted in her complaint. See Appellant Br. at 49–50. We are not persuaded that the district court abused its discretion in declining to reduce the fee award. The Supreme Court has No. 12-1518 Waldo v. Consumers Energy Company Page 22 instructed that “the most critical factor” governing the reasonableness of a fee award “is the degree of success obtained.” Hensley, 461 U.S. at 436. In cases when “a plaintiff has obtained excellent results, his attorney should recover a fully compensatory fee.” Id. at 435. Accordingly, we have explained that “a reduction in attorney fees [awarded to a prevailing plaintiff] is to be applied only in rare and exceptional cases where specific evidence in the record requires it.” Isabel v City of Memphis, 404 F.3d 404, 416 (6th Cir. 2005). Specifically, a court should not measure a plaintiff’s success simply by using a ratio of successful claims to claims raised. See Deja Vu of Nashville, Inc. v. Metro. Gov’t of Nashville & Davidson Cnty., 421 F.3d 417, 423 (6th Cir. 2005). Indeed, “[w]e have ‘repeatedly rejected mechanical reductions in fees based on the number of issues on which a plaintiff has prevailed.’” Imwalle v. Reliance Med. Prods., Inc., 515 F.3d 531, 554 (6th Cir. 2008) (quoting Deja Vu, 421 F.3d at 423). Instead, “[w]hen claims are based on a common core of facts or are based on related legal theories, for the purpose of calculating attorney fees they should not be treated as distinct claims, and the cost of litigating the related claims should not be reduced.” Deja Vu, 421 F.3d at 423 (internal quotation marks omitted). This is because when several claims arise from a common core of facts, “[m]uch of counsel’s time will be devoted generally to the litigation as a whole, making it difficult to divide the hours expended on a claim-byclaim basis. Such a lawsuit cannot be viewed as a series of discrete claims.” Hensley, 461 U.S. at 435. In this case, the district court did not abuse its discretion in finding that all of Waldo’s claims were related and involved a common core of facts. See Waldo, 2012 WL 1085190, at . We agree with the district court that all of Waldo’s claims focused on the same series of incidents demonstrating the ways in which her coworkers subjected her to sexual harassment. The district court found that the evidence gathered through the twenty-five depositions taken in the case as well as “extensive written discovery . . . . related to all three claims of sexual harassment/hostile work environment, discrimination, and retaliation.” Id. at . The district court further explained: Although Plaintiff did not prevail on her discrimination and retaliation claims, the Court cannot emphasize enough that Plaintiff’s successful No. 12-1518 Waldo v. Consumers Energy Company Page 23 sexual harassment/hostile work environment claim shared a common core of facts with all the asserted claims from the beginning to the conclusion of this case. The discrimination, hostile work environment, and retaliation claims presented in this case were closely intertwined; they involved essentially the same underlying facts and evidence; and all pertained to Plaintiff’s ultimate claim concerning a hostile work environment, which was the basis for the damages awarded. Id. We agree that all of the evidence presented concerning the discriminatory treatment of Waldo in the workplace, as well as evidence of retaliation for Waldo’s complaints of harassment, related to the hostility Waldo faced at Consumers because of her gender. We previously have concluded that harassment, discrimination, and hostilework-environment claims are related for purposes of attorney fees, and have reversed as an abuse of discretion a district court’s reduction of fees based on a plaintiff’s success on only some of several interrelated Title VII claims. See Jordan, 464 F.3d at 603–04. In Jordan, because there was a “significant legal overlap” between claims of racial discrimination, harassment, and retaliation, we held that under Hensley the plaintiff was entitled to “a full recovery for counsel’s services, rather than a percentage reduction,” even though he succeeded on only some of his claims. See id. We explained the reason why a full recovery was warranted as follows: [L]itigation is not an ‘exact science’: Lawyers cannot preordain which claims will carry the day and which will be treated less favorably. Good lawyering as well as ethical compliance often requires lawyers to plead in the alternative. Fee awards comport with that reality by giving full credit to a meaningfully successful plaintiff, rather than making a mechanical per-losing-claim deduction from an attorney’s fee award. Id. at 604 (citations omitted).4 Accordingly, we have repeatedly upheld a district court’s refusal to reduce an attorney fee award when a plaintiff prevails on only some of his or 4 In our view, unlike that of the dissent, Waldo was just as much a “meaningfully successful plaintiff” as was Jordan. Jordan, 464 F.3d at 604. Waldo, like Jordan, succeeded on a significant issue in her litigation, and she achieved substantial overall relief—a $7.9 million jury verdict, later reduced to the statutory cap of $300,000. Because all of the employment-discrimination claims in their respective cases arose out of a common core of facts, their lawsuits “cannot be viewed as . . . series of discrete claims.” Hensley, 461 U.S. at 435. Accordingly, a fully compensatory attorney fee was within the district court’s discretion to award. No. 12-1518 Waldo v. Consumers Energy Company Page 24 her related anti-discrimination causes of action, and our sister circuits have done the same. See, e.g., Imwalle, 515 F.3d at 554–56 (upholding full attorney fee award when plaintiff succeeded on only three of nine claims); Isabel, 404 F.3d at 416 (rejecting argument that fee award should be reduced because plaintiffs lost three out of their four claims); Thurman v. Yellow Freight Sys., Inc., 90 F.3d 1160, 1169–70 (6th Cir. 1996); see also Roberts v. Roadway Express, Inc., 149 F.3d 1098, 1111 (10th Cir. 1998); Dunning v. Simmons Airlines, Inc., 62 F.3d 863, 873–74 (7th Cir. 1995). Further, a full recovery was permissible because Waldo “obtained excellent results.” Hensley, 461 U.S. at 435. She sought damages and received $300,000, the maximum award possible under Title VII (the jury thought she deserved $7,900,000).5 See 42 U.S.C. § 1981a(b)(3)(D); R. 255 (Judgment) (Page ID #4125). Waldo succeeded on a significant and central issue in the litigation, namely that she was subjected to a hostile work environment at Consumers because of her gender. She thus succeeded in “remedying a civil rights violation” and “serv[ed] as a private attorney general, vindicating a policy that Congress considered of the highest priority.” Fox v. Vice, 131 S. Ct. 2205, 2213 (2011) (internal quotation marks omitted). The district court acted within its discretion in finding that Waldo’s attorneys should receive a fully compensatory fee for this excellent result. See id. (“Fee shifting in [a successful civil rights] case at once reimburses a plaintiff for what it cost him to vindicate civil rights, and holds to account a violator of federal law.” (internal quotation marks, citations, and 5 Although the dissent insinuates that the attorney fee award was unreasonable because it was slightly more than twice as much as the damages award to Waldo, see Dissent at 30, 32, “[i]n the civil rights area, there is no requirement that the amount of an award of attorneys’ fees be proportional to the amount of the underlying award of damages.” Bldg. Serv. Local 47 Cleaning Contractors Pension Plan v. Grandview Raceway, 46 F.3d 1392, 1401 (6th Cir. 1995); see City of Riverside v. Rivera, 477 U.S. 561, 574 (1986) (plurality op.). In City of Riverside, the Supreme Court upheld an attorney fee award that was more than seven times greater than the damages awarded to plaintiffs. We similarly have affirmed an attorney fee award that was more than five times the damages awarded to a plaintiff in a civil rights case, stating that “the value of the rights vindicated goes beyond the actual monetary award, and the amount of the actual award is not controlling.” McHenry v. Chadwick, 896 F.2d 184, 189 (6th Cir. 1990). As the Supreme Court explained in City of Riverside: “Congress enacted § 1988 specifically because it found that the private market for legal services failed to provide many victims of civil rights violations with effective access to the judicial process. . . . In order to ensure that lawyers would be willing to represent persons with legitimate civil rights grievances, Congress determined that it would be necessary to compensate lawyers for all time reasonably expended on a case.” 477 U.S. at 576, 578. Notwithstanding the dissent’s apparent displeasure with Congress’s chosen policy, our precedents establish that an attorney fee award in a civil rights case is not unreasonable merely because it is greater than the damages awarded to the plaintiff. No. 12-1518 Waldo v. Consumers Energy Company Page 25 alterations omitted)). Accordingly, the district court’s refusal to reduce the fee award because Waldo succeeded on only one of her claims was permissible. We are not persuaded by the dissent’s contention that it was an abuse of discretion for the district court to refuse to reduce Waldo’s fee award because the jury found in her favor on only the hostile-work-environment claim. The dissent’s emphasis and reemphasis on the fraction of claims in Waldo’s complaint on which her damages award was based—the dissent’s spin on Waldo’s success as “los[ing] the first jury trial” and “los[ing] six of the seven claims,” Dissent at 30 (emphasis in original)—runs contrary to our clear precedents holding that a fee award may not be reduced based on a ratio of claims brought to claims won. As we held in DiLaura when we reversed a district court’s reduction in attorney fees, “[b]y focusing on the fact that most of the plaintiffs’ claims failed . . . [a court] does what Hensley specifically forbids: it analyzes a series of related legal claims based on a common core of facts, and determines the amount of fees, not based on the plaintiffs’ overall success, but based on the success or failure of the individual claims.” DiLaura, 471 F.3d at 673. The dissent’s argument that Waldo was only minimally successful ignores the reality that Waldo’s attorneys achieved an excellent result for their client. Waldo’s complaint sought “all appropriate damages” arising out of the unlawful employment practices at Consumers, see R. 1 (Compl. ¶ 65) (Page ID #17), and the jury awarded Waldo $7,900,000 (later remitted to $300,000 pursuant to a statutory cap). Given this excellent result, a fully compensatory attorney fee award was appropriate. See Hensley, 461 U.S. at 435 (holding that when “a plaintiff has obtained excellent results, . . . . the fee award should not be reduced simply because the plaintiff failed to prevail on every contention raised in the lawsuit”); Isabel, 404 F.3d at 416 (“A proffer of alternative arguments does not justify reducing an award, especially where the arguments were made on a common set of facts and success on just one of the arguments would achieve the hoped-for results.”). Additionally, we reject the dissent’s assertion that the work done litigating this case would have been cleanly divisible between the claims. The legal standards governing Waldo’s Title VII claims and her corresponding state-law claims under the No. 12-1518 Waldo v. Consumers Energy Company Page 26 Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act (ELCRA) are nearly identical. See Wasek v. Arrow Energy Servs., Inc., 682 F.3d 463, 468 (6th Cir. 2012) (hostile work environment); id. at 472 (retaliation); Ondricko v. MGM Grand Detroit, LLC, 689 F.3d 642, 652–53 (6th Cir. 2012) (discrimination). Accordingly, it would be “difficult to divide the hours expended on a claim-by-claim basis” as between the federal and state-law claims. Hensley, 461 U.S. at 435. Further, “[t]his court has in fact held that discrimination and retaliation claims are related for the purpose of awarding attorney fees.” Imwalle, 515 F.3d at 555. Here, as in Imwalle, “there [wa]s a significant overlap in the legal theories” underlying Waldo’s discrimination, retaliation, and hostile-work-environment claims. Id. The Supreme Court in Hensley held that “[l]itigants in good faith may raise alternative legal grounds for a desired outcome, and the court’s rejection of or failure to reach certain grounds is not a sufficient reason for reducing a fee.” Hensley, 461 U.S. at 435.6 As we have explained, we have routinely concluded that these types of claims are interrelated, and have affirmed district courts’ decisions to compensate successful plaintiffs for work done on all of the claims, even when only some are ultimately successful. Contrary to Consumers’s contention, see Appellant Br. at 51, it also was not an abuse of discretion for the district court to award Waldo fees relating to the first trial. “[T]he question of whether a party ‘prevailed’ and whether a fee award is ‘reasonable’ is not one to parse too thinly . . . [based on] the number of trials required to reach a result.” Abner v. Kan. City S. Ry. Co., 541 F.3d 372, 382 (5th Cir. 2008). Accordingly, “so long as a plaintiff’s actions are not responsible for the need for a second trial, the plaintiff may be compensated for time spent on both proceedings.” Shott v. Rush- 6 The dissent’s citation to Hensley as a “spot-on comparison” in this regard is also off the mark. The Hensley Court explained that if a plaintiff challenged several factually unrelated institutional practices and conditions—for example, the physical environment of buildings in a state hospital, the hospital’s visitation, telephone and mail policies, and its alleged policy of giving patients excessive medication, see 461 U.S. at 427 n.1—success on only one of those claims would not warrant recovery of attorney fees for time spent litigating all of the claims. Id. at 436. This was not the situation presented by the instant case. Waldo challenged a single, factually unified unlawful employment practice at Consumers: its discriminatory treatment and harassment of female employees. Although Waldo sought relief through several “alternative legal grounds,” all of those grounds arose out of a “common core of facts.” Id. at 435. Accordingly, Waldo’s fee award should not be reduced because Waldo’s success was based on only one of those “related legal theories.” Id. No. 12-1518 Waldo v. Consumers Energy Company Page 27 Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Med. Ctr., 338 F.3d 736, 740 (7th Cir. 2003).7 The First, Second, Fifth, Seventh, and Tenth Circuits have all permitted attorney fees to be awarded for multiple trials, so long as “the plaintiff’s unreasonable behavior did not cause” the need for multiple proceedings and as long as counsel’s time was reasonably expended. Abner, 541 F.3d at 381–82; see Flitton v. Primary Residential Mortg., Inc., 614 F.3d 1173, 1177 (10th Cir. 2010); O’Rourke, 235 F.3d at 737; Gierlinger v. Gleason, 160 F.3d 858, 877–78 (2d Cir. 1998); Jaffee v. Redmond, 142 F.3d 409, 416 (7th Cir. 1998). Here, the hours spent litigating the first trial were reasonably expended to achieve a positive result for Waldo, and the need for a second trial was not created by any unreasonable missteps by Waldo or her attorneys. Accordingly, the district court could, in its discretion, award fees for the first trial. The dissent attempts to distinguish these cases, arguing that Waldo should be denied fees for the first trial because her counsel was to blame for the granting of the new trial. See Dissent at 31. We cannot agree that Waldo’s counsel behaved unreasonably or made mistakes that created the need for a second trial. Faulting Waldo’s counsel in these circumstances reflects a misunderstanding of the nature of a Rule 59 motion. A Rule 59 motion is not, as the dissent suggests, a means of achieving a “do-over” in the case of poor performance by counsel. Instead, it preserves the trial judge’s authority to prevent a jury verdict from standing when, in the district court’s view, the jury’s verdict was against the clear weight of the evidence and a new trial is necessary to “prevent a miscarriage of justice.” Holmes, 78 F.3d at 1047. Rule 59 thus preserves the trial judge’s power to “provide[] substantial protection against th[e] risk” that “jury prejudice may deprive a victim of discrimination of the verdict to which he or she is entitled.” Curtis v. Loether, 415 U.S. 189, 198 (1974). The dissent joins our view of the evidence in the first trial and agrees that it was not an abuse of discretion for the district court to find that the first jury’s verdict was against the clear weight of the 7 The dissent points out that the Seventh Circuit in Shott rejected the claim for fees for multiple trials. It fails to mention, however, that the reason the claim for fees was rejected there was that the plaintiff’s counsel was responsible for the need for multiple trials—a circumstance not present in this case, as explained infra. See Shott, 338 F.3d at 741. No. 12-1518 Waldo v. Consumers Energy Company Page 28 evidence. See Denhof, 494 F.3d at 543. The dissent’s contention that Waldo’s counsel should be penalized for marshaling such a strong case on behalf of Waldo is baffling.