Morris v. Hyundai Motor Am., No. B290693 (D2d7 Oct. 11, 2019)
An appeal of a attorneys’ fee award in a Song-Beverly Act case. In those cases, a prevailing attorney gets paid based on “actual time expended,” regardless of the size of the recovery. That encourages good attorneys to take these cases because the attorneys can get fully compensated despite the typical mid-five figure amount in controversy. Unfortunately, it also sometimes encourages overbilling.
Plaintiffs’ lawyers here sought about $200k―$128k with a 1.5 multiplier―but got whacked down to $75k by the trail court. Plaintiff argues the trial court engaged in a prohibited “proportionality analysis,” where a fee award gets reduced to be in line with the recovery. That’s not ok in Lemon Law cases because that is not “actual time expended.” But that’s not what happened here, so far as the Court of Appeal reads the record.
Instead, the judge reduced the award because he thought the lawyers overstaffed the case. Eleven different attorneys from two firms billed on the case, in which discovery was not litigated and did not go to trial. The court found six attorneys be redundant and cut their time entirely. It also cut the rates.
None of that was an abuse of discretion. A trial court can use across the board cuts if it feels like an unreasonable amount of time has gone into a lodestar. For instance, instead of cutting six lawyers, the court could have cut 30 percent of each lawyer’s time. That would have reached the same result and been fine. The court also had discretion to reduce the billers’ hourly rates, notwithstanding unrebutted evidence that the rates charged were similar to those for other attorneys in the same area of practice. The court could have found, for instance, that that the matter wasn’t all that complex, that the case didn’t go to trial, or that senior partners were doing associate-grade work.
Affirmed.
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