Judgment Roll Limited Appeal; Trial Court Found Apportionment Not Needed, And Defendant Did Not Identify Fee Entitlement Basis for Winning $10 Business Defamation Award.
This next case, in our view, can well encapsulate many results we have seen over the years on fee disputes. One party wins a small damages award under a pro-statutory shifting statute, and other party wins an even smaller damages award with no fee entitlement. The result is that party one wins the appeal, given that second party cannot beat party one’s fee entitlement/reasonableness of claimed fees and second party cannot articulate a fee entitlement basis. So, here are the facts bearing out what we have seen in many cases, although in variant factual situations.
In Jiang v. Wang, Case No. A136974 (1st Dist., Div. 2 Nov. 22, 2013) (unpublished), plaintiff employee won about $11,700 on wage/hour claims, garnering a $33,180 fee award based on statutory fee-shifting statutes. Defendant employer won $10 on a business defamation claim, but was awarded no fees. Employer appealed.
No change in result.
First of all, employer appealed on a judgment roll which has many, many presumptions against it. (Unless you really have no budget, don’t do it.)
Employer could not articulate a basis for fees on its defamation win, so that was that.
Employer’s challenge to the “unreasonableness” of employee’s fee award did not gain traction because no basis, on a judgment roll, existed to show that the lower court had to apportion time on what it perceived to be interrelated issues. Also, the reviewing court found it hard to believe that 90 hours of billing for two attorneys in a two-day trial was preposterous on its face. Plaintiff employee’s fees remained undisturbed in this one.
BLAWG BONUS: What exactly is a “roll” in the legal sense of the word? “A schedule of parchment which may be turned up with the hand in the form of a pipe or tube,” according to Black’s Law Dictionary, 2nd Ed. (1910). “A schedule or sheet of parchment on which legal proceedings are entered.” There are rolls and rolls and rolls: “In English practice, there were formerly a great variety of these rolls, appropriated to the different proceedings; such as the war- rant of attorney roll, the process roll, the recognizance roll, the imparlance roll, the pica roll, the issue roll, the judgment roll, the scire facias roll, and the roll of proceedings on writs of error.”
“In modern practice, [i.e., 1910] the term is sometimes used to denote a record of the proceedings of a court or public office.” By 1910, however, the original sense of the word had outlived its appropriateness, “for such records are no longer prepared in the form of a roll.” Yet we still talk about “judgment rolls” in the 21st century. That’s legal jargon for you.