Fourth District, Division 3 Reverses Paring of Fees from $62,400 to $20,000.
Just to show you that a litigant’s failure to cooperate and the resultant expenses to a plaintiff will often come back to haunt that noncooperative litigant, we discuss Liu v. Wolfe, Case No. G043254 (4th Dist., Div. 3 Feb. 18, 2011) (unpublished) as a good illustration of the point.
There, a default judgment was entered against an attorney defendant and his related business entities arising from an apparent investment scam. The default judgment was for $150,000 (the principal investment) and $86,250 in prejudgment interest. No punitive damages were awarded, although the matter was remanded for the lower court to clarify if it intended to award some. However, as it relates to our blog, the trial court awarded plaintiff attorney’s fees of $20,000 rather than the requested $62,400 which had actually been paid by plaintiff to his attorney.
On appeal, a 3-0 panel of the Fourth District, Division 3, in an opinion authored by Acting Presiding Justice Bedsworth, reversed and ordered a full $62,400 fee recovery for plaintiff.
The prime reason? Defendant had failed to cooperate in the litigation, causing plaintiff to make constant motions which ran up the expense. The gauge for a “reasonable” attorney’s fee is the amount it actually costs under a proper lodestar analysis, not what a jurist thinks it ought to cost to litigate. Even though the amount sought was somewhat high for a default judgment case, it was just to allow the entire award given the defense strategy that ran up fees for plaintiff.
BLOG OBSERVATION–The results in this case resembles the analysis that family law judges often use in awarding fees as sanctions under Family Code section 271.