Dummy Office And Self-Inflicted Wound

The District of Columbia Court of Appeals remanded a fee request of a court-appointed guardian that had been denied by the trial court.

The issue involved time charges for travel to and from a UPS store in Mitchellville, Maryland

Specifically, we question the relevance and thus the reasonableness of these 16.7 hours of work. It is far from clear how any of it related to concerns raised about Mr. Gardner’s more than $2,000 of travel time to see L.B., about where he actually did his probate work, or about whether he had been truthful in his statements to the court. Instead, much of Mr. Gardner’s eight-page response to C.B.’s objection to the travel time billed in his initial fee petition was devoted to unrelated matters: the procedural history of the case, attacks on C.B., and a discussion of work he had not billed for. He devoted less than a page to his explanation for his use of a beyond-the-beltway dummy address as his point of origin for travel. Moreover, the explanation he gave—safety concerns about disclosing his home office address— did not address why he had not told the court the Mitchellville, MD address was not his real office address, or why he had not billed for travel from the downtown D.C. address in his signature block (an address that was much closer to L.B.’s Dupont Circle residence). Similarly, the amended petition Mr. Gardner subsequently filed after the Superior Court denied his initial fee petition was largely nonresponsive to the concerns the court clearly expressed about whether he was entitled to compensation for roundtrip travel time from an undisclosed, outside-the-beltway dummy address—the court stated that it would “not [be] reasonable” for him to bill from an address that was not his and directed him to explain why he had not billed from his signature-block D.C. address. Instead, Mr. Gardner’s amended fee petition diverted attention to discussing the work for his other business enterprises, where he conducted that work, and whether he complied with tax regulations. The work he did to review materials (such as fee petitions from other court-appointed fiduciaries) and create exhibits (like eight photographs of his home office) for his amended petition was equally misdirected.

Remand

More fundamentally, the Superior Court should have taken into account Mr. Gardner’s responsibility for generating the additional litigation about his right to compensation. Mr. Gardner failed to give the court complete and accurate information. He misrepresented in his billing statement that he made roundtrip visits to L.B. from his “MD Office located at 12138 Central Ave, Mitchelville, MD.” Because C.B. objected to the use of an address that was not Mr. Gardner’s office but a UPS store, he had to file a response. And because his response was largely nonresponsive and raised more questions for the court, he had to file an amended petition. And, of course, had he not had to file a response and an amended petition, he never would have had to file a supplemental petition to seek compensation for work done on these filings. In other words, the work Mr. Gardner did to defend his right to compensation appears to have been wholly self-inflicted.

(Mike Frisch)