Florida Employment Lawyer BLOG

For years federal courts have wrestled with how to handle an award of attorneys’ fees when a party is only partially successful. For example, if you file an age discrimination claim under the ADEA and a sex discrimination claim under Title VII, how does the trial court award fees if you prevail on only one of the two claims? Some courts would award all of your attorneys’ fees without discounting for the fact that you did not prevail on a specific claim. Other courts would cut the attorneys’ fees in half because you only prevailed on half of the lawsuit. Still other courts would arbitrarily reduce the attorneys’ fees by an amount fair to the losing party by virtue of the fact that it may have prevailed on some of the claims. (This third approach is completely arbitrary and gives trial judges virtually unlimited discretion to award the amount of fees it deems reasonable. Thankfully, this approach to awarding fees was expressly rejected by the Supreme Court in 2009 in Purdue v. Kenny A).
This week the Supreme Court created a bright line rule that limited attorneys’ fees to fees incurred solely to defending a frivolous claim. In Fox v. Vice, a unanimous court held that a party who is awarded attorneys’ fees because part but not all of a lawsuit is deemed frivolous is entitled only to those fees incurred uniquely to the frivolous claims. For example, if a deposition was taken in support of both frivolous and non-frivolous claims, attorneys’ fees for the deposition cannot be awarded. Only attorneys’ fees uniquely attributable to defending against the frivolous claim are compensable.
This ruling is important for two reasons:
First – it significantly limits the amount of attorneys’ fees that can be awarded to a defendant who successfully files a motion for sanctions under Rule 11 or Section 1927. A large fee award to a defendant would only be justified if an entire lawsuit is deemed frivolous.
Second – it provides guidance, indirectly, to district judges who award prevailing plaintiffs’ their attorneys’ fees when their claims are only partially successful. In the context of a civil rights claim, a prisoner who files a section 1983 claim for excessive force and a section 1983 claim for an illegal search should be entitled to 100% of the lodestar even if he only wins on the excessive force claim. All of the depositions, discovery and motion practice would be identical and indivisible notwithstanding the two claims. This is critical because district court judges routinely order blanket deductions (15%, 50%, 75%) off the prevailing attorneys’ lodestar. As a result of giving district court judges so much discretion, competent plaintiffs’ attorneys are refusing to take meritorious claims out of fear (and it is fear) of not being properly compensated. Civil rights and constitutional claims are treated as private attorney general statutes, and accordingly, plaintiffs’ attorneys who take these extraordinarily difficult cases on a contingency basis should be fully compensated for their work.
The decision is here.