Court Opinion

ID: 9640739
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 17:14:00.697196+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:32.518241
License: Public Domain

HECHT, Justice,
concurring and dissenting.
I agree with the majority that the award of attorney fees for legal services rendered appellee in the trial court should be affirmed. I do not agree with their reasoning, however, nor do I agree that the award of attorney fees for legal services rendered appellee on appeal should be reversed. I would affirm the trial court's judgment in its entirety.
The majority hold that a trial court called upon to find reasonable attorney fees in a Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act case cannot take judicial notice of what fees are reasonable in such cases. I disagree. I find two sources of authority for such judicial notice.
First, the Legislature has expressly acknowledged the court’s power to take judicial notice of the usual and customary attorney fees in a case in which it must find the reasonable amount of such fees, in section 38.004 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code Annotated (Vernon 1986), which states:
The court may take judicial notice of the usual and customary attorney’s fees and of the contents of the case file without receiving further evidence in:
(1) a proceeding before the court; or
(2) a jury case in which the amount of attorney’s fees is submitted to the court by agreement.
Although this section is included in a chapter of the code authorizing recovery of attorney fees only in cases specified in section 38.001, not including DTPA cases, the plain language of section 38.004 does not restrict its application to section 38.001 cases. By contrast, sections 38.002 and 38.003 are expressly limited to section 38.-001 cases.1 The location of section 38.004 in the Civil Practice and Remedies Code, rather than in the DTPA, ought not to limit its application. Not only does the language of the section itself not permit such a limitation, to read the section restrictively would violate section 38.005, which prescribes: “This chapter shall be liberally construed to promote its underlying purposes.” The underlying purpose of section 38.004 can only be to encourage judicial notice of what attorney fees are reasonable. Limiting its application to section 38.001 cases does not promote, but rather impairs, its purpose.
The majority hold that section 38.004 does not apply to DTPA cases, concluding:
If the Legislature had intended for a trial court to take judicial notice of the reasonableness of attorney’s fees in all cases, then it could have done so by simply adopting a separate statute instead of a statute that only deals with specific types of claims.
I agree with this statement, but I submit that the separate statute the majority is hunting for is section 38.004. I would give section 38.004 its plain meaning and hold that it authorizes the court in any case in which it is to find attorney fees to take judicial notice of the usual and customary fees for legal services like those rendered in the case before it. Having allowed the trial court to take judicial notice of what fees are usual and customary, I would further allow it to determine, without requiring additional evidence, whether such fees are reasonable in the case before it.
Even if the plain language of section 38.004 were to be ignored, I find a second source of authority for taking judicial notice of what attorney fees are reasonable: that is, rule 201 of the Texas Rules of Civil Evidence. As I read section 38.004, it does *429not extend the scope of judicial notice but merely expresses the Legislature’s view that the reasonableness of attorney fees is the sort of subject which can be judicially noticed. I consider section 38.004 to be, not a grant of new authority to the courts, but an encouragement to use the authority already existent under the rules of evidence. Before the 1979 amendments to the predecessor of section 38.001 authorizing judicial notice of usual and customary attorney fees, courts uniformly held that they lacked power to take judicial notice of such fees. The addition of what is now section 38.004 to the statute renders those earlier cases no longer controlling. The majority do not dispute that courts can take judicial notice of reasonable attorney fees in section 38.001 cases. It makes little sense to me that a court can take judicial notice of what fees are reasonable in some types of cases but not in others.
I should add that the court’s power to take judicial notice of reasonable attorney fees would not preclude offering specific evidence on the subject. Counsel might choose to point out to the court by way of evidence rather than argument why legal fees in some particular amount are reasonable in a case. In my view, counsel would simply not be required to recite a litany the court itself knows well, and to intone the word “reasonable”, to enable the court to award attorney fees.
The majority find the evidence in this case sufficient to support the trial court’s award of attorney fees for services rendered in the trial court but insufficient to support the award of fees for legal services to be rendered on appeal. The specific deficiency noted by the majority is the absence of evidence “as to the amount of time an appeal would take in this case or a reasonable hourly rate.” As to the rate, the majority do not explain why the testimony in “great detail” as to the hourly rates for legal services rendered in the trial court is not some evidence of reasonable rates for hours spent on appeal. As to the time to be involved in some future appeal, the majority do not explain how the lawyer who testified in this case could possibly have offered any meaningful testimony about how long this appeal would take. It is surely difficult in any case for an attorney to predict how long it will eventually take to respond to an appeal by another party. Generally, the trial court’s guess would be as good as counsel’s. To fault the evidence in this case as insufficient to support an award of fees for legal services to be rendered in the future is to demand more than can be supplied. I suspect, however, that the majority would uphold the award in this case if only one sentence were added to the record, such as counsel’s testimony:
Your Honor, I expect an appeal of this case might consume about 75 hours for which a reasonable fee, at $100 per hour, would be $7,500.
I would think justice would be better served if the trial court were to award attorney fees on appeal based upon its own assessment of the complexity of the case and the likely complexity of an appeal, aided only to the extent necessary by such summary testimony. I would hold that the trial court was empowered, under section 38.004 and rule 201, to reach and did reach its own conclusions on the reasonableness of the attorney fees requested for appeal and I would affirm those awards.

. Section 38.002 begins, "To recover attorney’s fees under this chapter_” Section 38.003 creates a presumption that the usual and customary attorney fees are reasonable “for a claim of the type described in Section 38.001”.