Report Also Shows That Reporting Attorneys Did Not Provide The “End Conclusions” To The Sanctions Requests.
In February 2017, the California Research Bureau issued a mandatory report for 2015-2016 relating to the use of CCP § 128.5 motions (whether alone or combined with CCP § 128.7 motions) as required under section 128.5. Although attorneys are under a requirement to report to the California Research Bureau, its results show that even reporting attorneys do not provide the actual order on the 128.5 proceeding in 64.4% of matters for which initial motion submissions were made. However, we do give you a flavor for the conclusions reached by the Bureau:
- 128.5 requests, whether single or combined with 128.7 requests, totaled only .05% of all civil filings for 2015-2016;
- 129 sanctions motions were made during 2015-2016, as reported;
- Of those reported motions, 11.6% were granted, 24% were denied, and 64.4% of the motions never resulted in reporting the results on the sanctions requests;
- The county leaders as far as numbers of sanctions requests were, in order: Los Angeles; Orange; San Francisco; San Diego; Santa Clara;
- If one takes away the nonreporting anomaly, one-third of the frivolous action requests were granted (15 of 46), with 6 of 15 awarded for full attorney’s fees requests and with the average award being $8,833; and
- When one boils down both the Bureau and Judicial Council statistics, less than one-half of 1% of civil cases filings involved 128.5 requests (singular or combined with 128.7 requests).