Court Opinion

ID: 9488643
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:51:12.089624+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:53:00.466904
License: Public Domain

RANDOLPH, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
We have said again and again — and the majority says it yet again — that the decision whether to award attorney’s fees, and in what amount, is entrusted to the “broad discretion” of the district court. But each time we render the sort of decision handed down today, that discretion becomes narrower and narrower. Strict legal rules, embodied in our opinions, begin to replace the good judgment of district judges in these matters. A familiar cycle takes over. The more rules we create, the more appeals we encourage, the more opinions we hand down, the more rules we impose. Discretionary justice, then, begins to take on the appearance of non-discretionary justice, wielded from the appellate bench.
Of course, if higher authority has mandated a particular principle, we must apply it. But the rules announced in the majority opinion are not of that sort. The Supreme Court’s decision in Hensley v. Eckerhart, 461 U.S. 424, 103 S.Ct. 1933, 76 L.Ed.2d 40 (1983), does not stand for the majority’s central proposition that a district court, in determining a plaintiffs degree of success in the litigation, is precluded from considering the *1389plaintiffs failure to prevail on related claims.1 Here is the segment in Hensley my colleagues find critical: “Where 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.” Id. at 435, 108 S.Ct. at 1940. This does not fit Goos. She mounted two claims, one for breach of contract, the other for retaliatory discharge. Her complaint sought $1.5 million in damages and reinstatement of employment. She lost the breach of contract claim on summary judgment. Before trial, she turned down an $18,-000 settlement offer. At trial, she argued that she had proven $19,000 to $20,000 in damages for back pay and lost benefits, and continued to seek unspecified damages for humiliation. The jury awarded her $9,000. While this is more than a nominal victory, it scarcely qualifies as an “excellent result.” At the least, the district court was not required to give her an “A” for success.
Ms. Goos, then, falls within the common sense holding of Hensley that when a plaintiff has achieved only limited or partial success, a district court may reduce the fee award to account for the limited success. “This will be true even where the plaintiffs claims were interrelated, nonfrivolous, and raised in good faith.” Id. at 436, 103 S.Ct. at 1941. It is true that Hensley repeatedly stressed that the critical factor was the “degree of success obtained.” Yet Hensley also recognized that failure to prevail on a related but distinct claim was an element of the degree of success. The Supreme Court cited a ease in which the plaintiff prevailed on only one out of six related claims as an example of the type of case in which a reduction in fees would clearly be in order. Id. In Hensley itself the plaintiffs prevailed on five of their six claims and the district court awarded them reasonable fees because it found the results were significant. Yet the Supreme Court remanded, stating that “the inquiry does not end with a finding that the plaintiff obtained significant relief. A reduced fee award is appropriate if the relief, however significant, is limited in comparison to the scope of the litigation as a whole.” Id. at 440, 103 S.Ct. at 1943.
The majority notices that plaintiffs’ lawyers often bring several claims and make several legal arguments in one lawsuit. That is true, but beside the point. Fees are to be awarded for success, not for “devotion and skill.” Hensley, 461 U.S. at 436,103 S.Ct. at 1941. The logic of Hensley is easy to follow: when claims are legally or factually related it will be difficult for courts to divide the hours on a claim-by-claim basis because much of a lawyer’s time will be spent advancing the litigation as a whole, rather than working specifically on one claim. Therefore, courts should not simply reduce the fees by 50% if a plaintiff succeeds on only half of her claims.
Hensley did not hold, however, that whenever a plaintiff brings two or more related claims she is entitled to recover all of her attorney’s fees as long as she achieved more than “minor” success on one of them. Rather, the Hensley Court, recognizing the obvious, believed that there would be times when a plaintiffs partial or limited success — including failure to prevail on related claims— would render an award of fees based on all of the hours spent on the litigation excessive. The Hensley opinion speaks for itself:
There is no precise rule or formula for making these determinations. The district court may attempt to identify specific hours that should be eliminated, or it may simply reduce the award to account for the limited success. The court necessarily has discretion in making this equitable judgment.
Id. at 436-37, 103 S.Ct. at 1941.
I think the only plausible interpretation of Hensley is that whenever the plaintiff does not hit the jackpot, when the result is not “excellent,” the plaintiffs lack of success on a related claim is a relevant factor in determining the appropriate amount of attorney’s fees. We recognized as much in Goos v. National Ass’n of Realtors, 997 F.2d 1565 (D.C.Cir.1993) (“Goos I ”). The last sentence in the Goos I opinion reads: “Because that *1390inquiry [the determination of the degree of Ms. Goos’s success] is subject to the discretion of the trial court, and because Ms. Goos’s failure to prevail on her contract claim must be considered as part of that analysis, we remand the case.” Id. at 1573. This strikes me as perfectly clear — Ms. Goos’s success was limited in at least two distinct ways: she received significantly less damages than she sought and she failed to prevail on her contract claim.
One need not plunge into deep legal analysis to realize that any other rule makes no sense. Where is the logic in saying — as the majority does — that a plaintiffs failure to prevail on a related claim has no bearing on the plaintiffs overall degree of success? If a plaintiff seeks some remedy or some legal ruling in her favor and spends time and resources to achieve that goal but ultimately fails, her “degree of success” has been reduced by that failure — and so should the attorney’s fees the defendant is ordered to pay. Of course there may be cases in which the relative unimportance of one legal issue — given the scope of the litigation, or the plaintiffs ultimate success on other claims— justifies a complete fee award. But I fail to see how a district court abuses its discretion whenever it takes into account the plaintiffs loss on a claim related to the one producing a victory of less than excellent proportions.
I am far from alone in believing that a plaintiffs failure to prevail on a related claim may be weighed in determining the plaintiffs degree of success. In Popham v. City of Kennesaw, 820 F.2d 1570 (11th Cir.1987), the court of appeals upheld a reduction in attorney’s fees based partly on the fact that plaintiff prevailed on only one of his eight claims. The Popham court held that comparing the number of successful claims to the number of unsuccessful claims “is germane to determining the degree of the plaintiffs success.” Id. at 1579.
Among the many other appellate decisions contrary to the majority’s decision are the following. Fleischhauer v. Feltner, 3 F.3d 148, 152-53 (6th Cir.1993), ruled that “the power to determine the reasonable attorney fees owing to qualified litigants ... includes the discretion to reduce the amount of the fee award based on unsuccessful claims.” Durant v. Independent School Dist., No. 16, 990 F.2d 560, 566 (10th Cir.1993), remanded for a determination whether reduction of attorney’s fees was appropriate in light of plaintiffs failure to prevail on a related claim. Estate of Borst v. O’Brien, 979 F.2d 511, 516 (7th Cir.1992), took into account the fact that plaintiff was successful on only one of his claims, which appeared to be legally and factually related to his unsuccessful claims. Rode v. Dellarciprete, 892 F.2d 1177, 1183 (3d Cir.1990), stated that “this general reduction [of the lodestar] accounts for time spent litigating wholly or partially unsuccessful claims that are related to the litigation of the successful claims.” Cabrales v. County of Los Angeles, 864 F.2d 1454, 1466 & n. 11 (9th Cir.1988), vacated on other grounds, 490 U.S. 1087, 109 S.Ct. 2425, 104 L.Ed.2d 982 (1989), “read Hensley as requiring a reduction for limited success even when the claims are related.” Jean v. Nelson, 863 F.2d 759, 771-72 (11th Cir.1988), aff'd on other grounds, 496 U.S. 154, 110 S.Ct. 2316, 110 L.Ed.2d 134 (1990), upheld a 15% reduction in fees for time spent on related unsuccessful claims. Greater L.A. Council on Deafness v. Community TV of So. Cal., 813 F.2d 217, 222-23 (9th Cir.1987), reduced fees by 60% based partly on plaintiffs’ failure to prevail on related claims. See also Allen v. Allied Plant Maintenance Co. of Tennessee, 881 F.2d 291, 299-300 (6th Cir.1989).
In short, the district court had discretion to consider Goos’s failure to succeed on her related claim when it determined the degree of her overall success in the litigation. The majority opinion rests on a misreading of Hensley. It bucks an impressive array of authority from the other circuits.2 And it *1391supplants the discretion of the trial courts with what is rapidly becoming a detailed appellate code governing awards of attorney’s fees. I therefore respectfully dissent.

. I shall assume, as does the majority, that Hensley 's inteipretation of 42 U.S.C. § 1988, governs our interpretation of the District of Columbia statute authorizing an award of a reasonable attorney's fee to plaintiff Goos in this case. (D.C. Code Ann. § l-2553(a)(l)(E)).

. The majority opinion is able to cite only one case, Jane L. v. Bangerter, 61 F.3d 1505 (10th Cir.1995), in which a court held that it would be an abuse of discretion to reduce a plaintiff's attorneys fees despite her lack of success on related claims. Jane L. strikes me as resting on the same mistaken analysis the majority employs here. Other cases the majority invokes merely uphold district court decisions that the plaintiffs' level of success merited a complete fee award. See Morgan v. District of Columbia, 824 F.2d 1049, 1066 (D.C.Cir.1987); Grant v. Martinez, *1391973 F.2d 96, 101 (2d Cir.1992), cert, denied,U.S.-, 113 S.Ct. 978, 122 L.Ed.2d 132 (1993) ("If ... unsuccessful claims [interrelated with the successful claims] exist the court must determine whether the plaintiff’s level of success warrants a reduction in the fee award.”); and Krodel v. Young, 576 F.Supp. 390, 396 (D.D.C.1983) (plaintiff achieved "excellent results”). Another case cited in the majority opinion upheld fee reductions. See Fishman v. Clancy, 763 F.2d 485, 491 (1st Cir.1985) (upholding fee reduction for time spent on unsuccessful claims that were "factual sisters” to the successful claim). Two additional cases the majority relies upon are simply not on point. The language quoted from Lenard v. Argento, 808 F.2d 1242, 1245-46 (7th Cir.1987), is dicta. The court upheld the fee reduction because it found that the successful and unsuccessful claims were unrelated. And in Hendrickson v. Branstad, 934 F.2d 158, 164 (8th Cir.1991), defendants did not argue that the fees should be reduced because the plaintiffs were not fully successful; they argued instead that the district court had misallocated the fees between the two defendants.