More guidance on resolving attorneys' fees petitions

A central feature of the federal civil rights laws is that the winning plaintiff will recover their attorneys' fees from the losing side. That award is above and beyond the damages award. The plaintiff's lawyer will submit a fee application to the court, which determines how much money the defendant has to pay to the attorney for successfully litigating the case. Every now and then, the Court of Appeals offers guidance on this process.

The case is A.C. v. New York City Dept. of Educ., issued on June 21. This is an Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA) case, where the parents of a disabled child sue the school district to provide a suitable educational plan, which sometimes involves placing the student in a specialized school. Actually, this is a series of cases that were consolidated into one appellate ruling. As the prevailing parties, the parents moved for attorneys' fees but were not not satisfied with the amounts awarded by the district court. The Court of Appeals (Jacobs, Menashi and Merriam) affirms and holds the district courts for the most part did not abuse their discretion in awarding fees.

The civil rights laws do not provide much guidance on how to calculate fees. One way that courts have filled in this gap is to have the lawyers multiply their court-approved hourly rates by the number of hours worked on the case. We call that the lodestar model. The lodestar amount may be adjusted if the lawyer spent excessive, redundant or unnecessary hours on the case. We also apply the Johnson factors, named after a Fifth Circuit case from 1974 that courts around the country has adopted to assist in the process. Here are the factors:

“[t]he time and labor required”; “[t]he novelty and difficulty of the questions”; “[t]he skill requisite to perform the legal service properly”; “[t]he preclusion of other employment by the attorney due to acceptance of the case”; “[t]he customary fee”; “[w]hether the fee is fixed or contingent”; “[t]ime limits imposed by the client or the circumstances”; “[t]he amount involved and the results obtained”; the experience, reputation, and skill of the attorneys; whether the case is undesirable and may not be “pleasantly received by the community” or the attorney’s contemporaries; “[t]he nature and length of the professional relationship with the client”; and “[a]wards in similar cases.”

In this case, the district court reduced the hourly rate, reasoning that the case was not especially complex. The parents appealed, arguing that the district court evaluated the complexity of the cases twice: when considering the number of hours reasonably expended as well as when considering the hourly rate. Case law says you can't consider the same factors twice. But the district court did not violate that principle because it considered the complexity factor in making two different determinations: (1) the hourly rate and (2) whether too much time was spent on the case. The ultimate holding here is that the district court may consider the complexity of the case in determining the hourly rate. The Second Circuit previously approved the complexity factor in Lilly v. City of New York. 934 F.3d 222 (2d Cir. 2019). 

The other significant holding is that the district court abused its discretion in denying the attorney any fees for travel. Most courts will cut the fee in half for travel on the basis that you are not really working while traveling to and from the case. Here, the district court denied all travel costs because a reasonable client would not retain an Auburn or Ithaca attorney over a New York City attorney if it meant paying big-city rates for the case and an additional five hours in billable time for each trip. Since the district cannot eliminate all travel time, that was an erroneous ruling. The case returns to the district court to recalculate the travel costs.