Fee Not Simple

The United States District Court for the District of Columbia substantially reduced a request for prevailing party attorneys’ fees in an unpaid wage action

Here, plaintiff’s counsel has turned a simple, straightforward unpaid wages claim thatwas resolved in weeks into a major fee generator, with the amount requested just for fees-on-fees equal to almost twenty times that of the wages initially in dispute. Indeed, absent plaintiff’s counsel’s excessive requests for attorneys’ fees in this otherwise simple case, with a completely uncontested underlying claim, this suit would have been settled in December 2021, nearly two years ago. Plaintiff’s counsel insists that defendants are to blame for this delay, due to their purported unwillingness to negotiate fees, but this placement of blame is wholly unwarranted when plaintiff’s counsel’s own unreasonable opening demand for attorneys’ fees is the obstacle that necessitated litigation of this issue. Plaintiff’s counsel first demanded $25,000 in fees, at a point when the only meaningful work they had completed to advance their client’s interests was filing the complaint, calculating plaintiff’s unpaid wages, and communicating the settlement demand with defense counsel, who had already made clear that defendants planned to settle plaintiff’s claim as quickly as possible by paying the full amount to which plaintiff claimed entitlement. Defs.’ Response at 4–5.

Awarding fees to plaintiff’s counsel anywhere close to their demand would put this Court in the position of approving their conduct in drawing this litigation out more than an additional year in pursuit of only their own pecuniary gain. Indeed, Judge Henderson on the D.C. Circuit has noted that she would impose sanctions on counsel who request excessive fees, particularly when counsel “spent more time working on fee matters than on tasks essential to [the client’s] claim.” Baylor I, 857 F.3d at 959 (Henderson, J., concurring). In that case, the “district court said of the fee request that ‘the tail [is] wagging the dog,” and counsel had “lost sight of the real party in interest.” Id. at 959–60 (alteration in original). Plaintiff’s counsel in this case has certainly lost sight of the real party in interest, namely, plaintiff. The parties agreed in December 2021 that defendants would pay plaintiff $4,379, and yet he has waited two years since then for resolution of this case, due in large part to the demands of his own counsel. Indeed, plaintiff’s counsel rejected defendants’ second settlement offer—offering plaintiff the full amount of overtime wages and liquidated damages he claimed—before even communicating that offer to their client, solely because they were dissatisfied with defendants’ offer on fees. See Burton Aff. ¶¶ 4–5. The $23,781.20 in fees and $124.17 in costs accumulated solely in the pursuit of advancing what was already an unreasonable request for attorneys’ fees will thus not be included in the fee award, under this Court’s broad discretion.

Once the attorneys’ fees claimed for work on the instant fee motion are subtracted from plaintiff’s fee request, $26,352.30 in requested fees remain. This amount is also unreasonable to award for several reasons, described below, so a multiplier should apply. For the following reasons, plaintiff will be awarded $9,000 in attorneys’ fees, corresponding to approximately one third of the fees requested in this case, and $500 in costs.

(Mike Frisch)