Court Opinion

ID: 9565131
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 19:15:26.920898+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:19:25.656432
License: Public Domain

Brailsford, Justice
(dissenting) :
I concur in the opinion of the majority except as to the amount awarded as attorney fees. As to that, I concur in Justice Littlejohn’s dissent for the reasons stated by him and for the following additional reasons.
The testimony of Mrs. Witham’s expert witnesses, the order appealed from and the brief all emphasize the concept that the exertions of esteemed and able counsel in the course of this litigation saved for Mrs. Witham in excess of $1,-500,000.00, albeit payable in installments. While other factors were considered, the record brings conviction that this conception of the amount involved in the controversy and of the benefits resulting to Mrs. Witham dominated the evaluation by the expert witnesses and the court of the legal services furnished her. While benefit conferred by legal services is an important factor for consideration in fixing a fee to be paid by the benefited client, in all fairness, much less weight should be given to it when the fee is to be assessed against the client’s adversary. But even if full weight be given to benefit conferred upon Mrs. Witham, as though the fee assessed would be paid by her, the conception of the amount of benefit as $1,500,000.00 is unsound.
In the first place, Mrs. Witham did not gain the right to these installment payments in this litigation, which merely preserved what was already her due. Nor does she get the money now. Instead, it is to be paid to her in installments over a period of some nineteen years, but only for so long as she lives. While there was no testimony as to the present value of the installments, common sense tells us that even without regard to the contingency of their accrual, such value is very substantially less than their sum.
*198There is another even more cogent reason why Mrs. Wit-ham’s expectancy was not worth nearly so much as the sum of the installments. We can be sure that the settlement was carefully drafted so that the annual installments would be deductible by Mr. Darden for tax purposes and reportable by Mrs. Witham as income. The genesis of this ancillary litigation was information received by Mr. Darden which suggested that installments paid after Mrs. Witham’s remarriage might not be so deductible — an apprehension that was laid at rest by our earlier decision. The record furnishes no basis for a calculation of the tax impact on the annual installments. It is, however, common knowledge that the tax rate on income in this range would exceed 50%. Inevitably, the present value of Mrs. Witham’s disposable income under the agreement would bear small resemblance to the sum of the installments, which was apparently regarded as the resulting benefit by Mrs. Witham’s expert witnesses.
It is, of course, true that the amount of the fee was addressed to the discretion of the esteemed circuit judge (who will soon succeed the writer as a justice of this Court) and that the amount allowed was well within the range of the expert opinions. However, the expert testimony does not relieve us of our duty to examine the reasonableness of the fee in the light of the entire record and of our own comprehension of such matters. Having done so, I find nothing to justify a fee of more than that, in effect, assented to by Mr. Darden through his expert witnesses. I am convinced that the amount awarded resulted from an unrealistic estimate of the benefit conferred on Mrs. Witham and on over-emphasis of the importance of this factor in a case of this kind, both by the distinguished lawyers who testified as experts and by the court. I would modify the judgment appealed from by reducing the amount awarded to $75,000.00.