Last Hurrah Is That No Side Was a Prevailing Party for Fee Recovery.
In what the appellate court itself described as an “epic contract dispute” over San Francisco property ownership between two sides litigated since 1999, the conclusion is a poignant one and one for which this blog was first inspired. No one was awarded attorney’s fees as the prevailing party, a determination sustained on appeal.
Shih v. Lien, Case No. A128525 (1st Dist., Div. 5 Aug. 11, 2011) (unpublished) involved a property dispute over certain San Francisco property in which Woo obtained property ownership but lot his bid to rescind the entire purchase agreement, while the other side beat the rescission attempt, retained an equitable share of the property, but lost a bid to strip Woo of control over the property. These “mixed results” led to the lower court denying each side’s request for fee recovery under a promissory note contractual clause, after undertaking both an “action-by-action” analysis and “litigation objective” scrutiny.
The appellate court affirmed. It found that the rescission claim was “on the contract” for Civil Code section 1717 purposes, so that it could be factored into the analysis of who prevailed on what. (Reveles v. Toyota by the Bay, 57 Cal.App.4th 1139, 1152 n. 6 (1997).) The Court of Appeal also agreed that no one got a clear victory, such that the “no prevailing party” determination by the trial judge was entitled to deference upon review.
BLAWG BONUS: “Makes Ben Hur look like an epic.” — Tagline for Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975).