Denial Of Fee Recovery Was Erroneous Because Plaintiff Was Entitled To Fee Under “Catalyst Theory."
“Litigation under the Public Records Act (PRA) (Gov. Code,1 § 6250 et seq.) is one of the rare instances where a losing party may still be deemed a prevailing party entitled to an attorney fee award. This is because the plaintiff has prevailed within the meaning of the PRA when he or she files an action that ‘results in defendant releasing a
copy of a previously withheld document.’ (Belth v. Garamendi (1991) 232 Cal.App.3d 896, 898 (Belth).) [¶] Thus, a plaintiff need not achieve a favorable final judgment to be a prevailing party in PRA litigation. A defendant's voluntary action in providing public records that is induced by plaintiff's lawsuit will still support an attorney fee award on the rationale that the lawsuit ‘spurred defendant to act or was a catalyst speeding defendant's response.’ (Belth, supra, 232 Cal.App.3d at p. 901.)”
This quote from Sukumar v. City of San Diego, Case No. D071527 (4th Dist., Div. 1 Aug. 15, 2017) (published) captures the “catalyst theory” allowing a losing party to still be deemed a prevailing one under the PRA’s fee shifting statute, Government Code section 6259(d), even though no final judgment is achieved. That led to the reversal of a trial judge’s denial of fees to a plaintiff requesting about $99,000 in fees under PRA.
What happened was that City, in a PRA action by plaintiff seeking documents in connection with alleged code violations relating to his house, represented that it had produced every responsive nonexempt document in response to a PRA request. However, after court-ordered depositions taken by plaintiff in the PRA action, City “sung” a different tune by subsequently producing five photographs and 146 pages of e-mails. Given this chain of events, the appellate court concluded it was an abuse of discretion not to grant reasonable fees to plaintiff—after all, the City would not have produced the information except for the court-ordered depositions. Plaintiff was a prevailing “catalyst” such that the matter was remanded to fix the amount of fees to be awarded to plaintiff.