Compensatory Award Was $560,709; 1.5 Fee Multiplier Also Justified.
In the FEHA civil rights area, the law is intentionally designed to confer reasonable attorney’s fees upon winning civil rights plaintiffs and only impose fees against them should the case be shown as frivolous/baseless in nature. The next case illustrates how substantial fee awards will be affirmed, rebuffing governmental entity arguments that mutlipliers are not justified or that the dismal state of the public fisc should somehow prevent fee recoveries to plaintiffs.
Rodriguez v. California Dept. of Justice, Case No. C064756 (3d Dist. Jan. 31, 2012) (unpublished) was a case where a FEHA plaintiff won damages of $560,709 and was subsequently awarded attorney’s fees as the prevailing party to the tune of $645,534 (full request award, including a 1.5 multiplier). The State DOJ was not happy and appealed the fee award.
No reversal of the fee award, in a 3-0 Third District panel decision.
No allocation was needed between different claims, because everything was interrelated.
The 1.5 multiplier was correctly granted. There was a FEHA rescission claim that DOJ conceded was novel/difficult, so this alone justified the multiplier. DOJ then relied on reasoning from a well-publicized sexual harassment decision, Weeks v. Baker & McKenzie, 63 Cal.App.4th 1128, 1175 (1998), to argue that the contingent nature of a fee award should not be given particular significance. The Rodriguez panel expressly disagreed with Weeks’ conclusion that the contingent nature of the fee award should be downplayed as a general proposition, finding it inconsistent with the California Supreme Court’s later discussion about the importance of this factor in Ketchum v. Moses, 24 Cal.4th 1122, 1132 (2002) [one of our Leading Cases]. (See Slip Opn., pp. 36-37.)
The appellate court also found that the impact on the public fisc should not alone carry the day and prevent a FEHA fee award.