Some Reductions In Requested Fees Made By U.S. District Judge.
In Desertrain v. City of Los Angeles, 754 F.3d 1147 (9th Cir. 2014), the Ninth Circuit invalidated, on constitutional grounds, a Los Angeles ordinance prohibiting use of cars as sleeping quarters, which the appeals court found was wrongfully targeted at the homeless.
We can now report that U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner has awarded $713,487 in attorney’s fees to the successful civil rights attorneys. He did make reductions for hours spent on drafting the complaint (not buying that more than 200 hours were in order—reducing them in half) and on preparing a motion for partial summary judgment and opposing the city’s summary judgment motion (with 739.1 hours being deemed excessive). In making reductions, District Judge Klausner did put some stock on the lower number of hours expended by defense counsel as a gauge of reasonableness, a topic we have posted on earlier. (See our June 8, 2008 post and our April 27, 2013 post on In re Tobacco Cases I, subsequently published at 216 Cal.App.4th 570 (2013), see especially pages 584-585.) However, a 1.2 multiplier was applied to the lodestar based the contingency factor—a high risk of nonpayment.
HAT TIP AND OBSERVATION—We thank Carter “Cappy” White of U.C. Davis School of Law’s Civil Rights Clinic for the “heads up” on this fee order. We also observe that Carol Sobel was involved in this case, an attorney providing expert fee testimony in many civil rights/public interest cases.