How Many Contempts?

Moore v. Superior Court, No. G058609 (D4d3 Nov. 11, 2020)

A trustee’s Attorney in a probate case got hit with a civil contempt judgment for misconduct during a settlement conference. Allegedly, he was rude and abusive to the other parties and the settlement officer, he accused opposing counsel of lying without affording any explanation. He refused to discuss settlement. And when the officer threatened to go to the judge, Attorney objected on the grounds that the settlement proceedings were confidential. The trial court found him guilty on these four counts and fined him $900 per violation. It also ordered him to pay the opposing party’s fees for the contempt litigation under Code of Civil Procedure § 1218(a).

An interesting side point—a contempt judgment is both final and nonappealable. See Code Civ. Proc. §§ 904.1(a)(1); 1222. So the judgment gets reviewed though a writ of review, which is not much used in other contexts. 

Attorney raises a number of grounds, but only one gets traction—the unit of prosecution. Attorney says all four alleged contempts arise from a single course of conduct during a fifteen minute settlement conference. Relying on Penal Code § 654, Attorney argues that fining him four times punishes him multiple times for the same act. The Court of Appeal agrees. Although the unit of offense rules are pretty fuzzy, contempt cases seem to limit multiple charges of contempt to separate, discreet acts. When, like here, there’s only one core incident, there’s only one punishable offense. So the Court of Appeal knocks the four counts down to one.

It also strikes the attorneys’ fees. Section 1218(a) permits a fee award for contempts where the contempt consists of violating a court order. That’s not the issue here. Attorney might have earned the contempt by being rude and disrespectful, but he didn’t violate any court order. So a fee award under § 1218(a) was not authorized.

Reversed in part.

These Bills Are Too Damn High...

Moore v. Mercer, No. C073064 (D3 Oct. 21, 2016)

Yet another case addressing the Howell rule for measuring past medical costs as and element damages in a PI case. Under that rule the initial rates billed to a patient by a healthcare provider aren’t dispositive because those rates are super-inflated, and pale in comparison to what ultimately gets paid, especially if paid by insurance. Plaintiff here wasn’t insured, and the hospital sold her bill to a collections agency. Defendant argued that what the hospital got from the agency is the true value of the services. 

This is pretty much the same facts as the Uspenskaya case, decided almost exactly one year ago. And it has the same result: the collections bill is admissible, but not dispositive. Same rule that applies to the hospital’s initial bill. So the jury’s damages award—which was between the two figures—is affirmed.

There’s a second issue, though. Defendant tried to get the (third party) doctor’s contract with the collections agency in discovery. The court denied a motion to compel on the grounds that the agreement was irrelevant and issued discovery sanctions against Defendant. That was error. The terms of an agreement under which claims are sold “bear[s] some probative value” as to the true reasonable value of the services. But given that the trial court said it would have excluded the evidence at trial—which would not necessarily been erroneous—the discovery error was harmless. The sanctions, however, are reversed. 

Notable quote: The “broad scope of permissible discovery is equally applicable to discovery of information from a nonparty as it is to parties in the pending suit.” (quoting Johnson v. Superior Court, 80 Cal. App. 4th 1050 (2000). That’s correct as a matter of the language of the Discovery Act, but read broadly, it’s in some tension with with the oft-cited Calcor decision, which suggests you should exhaust efforts to get discovery from a party before you burden a third party with document demands.

Reversed in part.