Court Opinion

ID: 9553914
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 19:37:24.434877+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:32:34.584761
License: Public Domain

OPALA, Justice,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
I concur in today’s opinion only insofar as it holds that the contract in suit is one for “services” within the meaning of 12 O.S.1981 § 936.
I cannot accede to the court’s view, initially adopted in Wieland v. Danner Auto Supply, Inc.,1 and now reiterated here, which accords “prevailing party” status to a plaintiff who has accepted a defendant’s lump-sum offer to confess judgment under the terms of 12 O.S.1981 § 1101. The defendant’s § 1101 lump-sum offer to confess judgment in this case should be construed as alMnclusive. It doubtless represents an effort to dispose of the offeror’s entire legal liability in the contested action and it must hence be treated in law as embracing within its terms all the items which the adversary party-offeree could have recovered in its suit. The counsel-fee claim was here but an element of the total recovery sought. Our teaching in Wieland — allowing counsel-fee recovery to a plaintiff who has accepted a § 1101 lump-sum offer to settle — should be confined by today’s decision to those § 1101 proposals of confession which in explicit terms (a) exclude counsel-fee liability from their purview, or (b) call for a post-acceptance adversary hearing to settle the fee to be allowed against the offeror.2
Lastly, I dissent from that part of today’s opinion which gives this court’s imprimatur to a $3,000 counsel-fee award for obtaining a-$l,500judgment by confession.,3
No economic benefit can be derived from legal service whose claimed cost is twice the amount of recovery. The objective gauge for pragmatically measuring the marketplace value of a lawyer’s forensic work must remain the same whether liability for its performance falls on the plaintiff who procured the rendition or on the *1191plaintiff’s vanquished adversary. Since no sane creditor would pay for collecting an obligation double the amount accepted as due from the debtor, judicial imposition of such counsel-fee liability makes no economic sense. It can be justified only as a punitive measure to deter defendants from waging forensic contests. There is no sanction in our law — decisional, statutory or constitutional — for judicial use of counsel-fee awards as a device to hamper the litigants’ access to courts, and I would not countenance, however obliquely, a course of decision-making that runs so clearly counter to the law’s long-established policy and to our constitutional order of free institutions.4
I would circumscribe the perimeter of the Wieland doctrine and reverse the fee award to the plaintiff-offeree with directions to vacate it in toto; I would let the unchallenged $1,500 judgment by confession stand and allow the plaintiff to recover additionally only ordinary cost items statutorily taxable of course5 in the district court; I would further direct that each party bear its own appeal-related counsel-fee expense.

. Okl., 695 P.2d 1332 [1984].

. In my view, the intended legislative objective of § 1101 clearly requires that all lump-sum offers made under its terms be so construed as to protect the offeror from additional liability for a post-acceptance counsel fee demand. All these offers must be read as implicitly inclusive of the offeror's entire obligation in suit. Every asserted item of claim, including the offeror's statutory or contractual counsel-fee liability, should be deemed embraced within the terms of a § 1101 lump-sum offer. See in this connection Marek v. Chesny, 473 U.S. 1, 105 S.Ct. 3012, 87 L.Ed.2d 1 [1985]. Since our pronouncement in Wieland we have held that when a § 1101 lump-sum offer explicitly states that it includes the offeror’s counsel-fee-obligation, the acceptance will operate to limit the plaintiffs recovery to the amount of confessed liability and to preclude the trial court from allowing counsel fees in addition to that amount. See Evans v. Sitton dba Wellston Auto Salvage and Garage, 735 P.2d 334 (1987). I would give like treatment to all § 1101 lump-sum offers and would regard their acceptance as an effective waiver of the plaintiffs claim to a contractual or statutory counsel fee. My notion of an implicit waiver is consistent with public policy and promotive of the law’s clear objective to facilitate settlements rather than to ambush the offeror-defendant in an unexpected post-acceptance fee battle. Not even in civil rights litigation has the Court found a public-policy ingredient that prohibits courts from sanctioning settlements by which the plaintiff waives a counsel-fee claim asserta-ble under the provisions of 42 U.S.C. § 1988. See, Evans v. Jeff D., — U.S. -, 106 S.Ct. 1531, 89 L.Ed.2d 747 [1986].

.Compare the standards applied here in arriving at the proper amount of counsel fee to be awarded with the court's more restrictive approach in Catlin Aviation Company v. Equilease Corporation, Okl., 626 P.2d 857, 861 [1981]; Parkhill Truck Company v. Reynolds, Okl., 359 P.2d 1064, 1068 [1961] and Woods v. Levine, Okl., 311 P.2d 204, 206 [1957].

. Art. 2, §§ 6 and 7, Okl. Const.; Moses v. Hoebel, Okl., 646 P.2d 601 [1982] and Bishop v. Bishop, Okl., 321 P.2d 416 [1958].

. For a legal meaning of the term "of course” see Chamberlin v. Chamberlin, Okl., 720 P.2d 721, 726 [1986].