Corder v. Brown

• Decision Date: 02 June 1994
• Docket Number: No. 92-56271,92-56271
• Citation: 25 F.3d 833
• Parties: Lillian CORDER; Roberta Lombardo, Plaintiffs-Appellees, v. Roy BROWN, Defendant-Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Ninth Circuit

Page 833

25 F.3d 833

Lillian CORDER; Roberta Lombardo, Plaintiffs-Appellees, v. Roy BROWN, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 92-56271.

United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit.

Argued and Submitted April 4, 1994.

Submission Withdrawn May 3, 1994.

Resubmitted May 27, 1994.

Decided June 2, 1994.

Timothy T. Coates, Greines, Martin, Stein & Richland, Beverly Hills, CA, for the defendant-appellant.

Stephen Yagman, Yagman & Yagman, Venice, CA, for the plaintiffs-appellees.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Central District of California.

Before: HUG, WIGGINS, and NOONAN, Circuit Judges.

Opinion by Judge WIGGINS.

WIGGINS, Circuit Judge:

The district court awarded plaintiffs-appellees $90,333 in attorney's fees after they prevailed in a 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983 action. Corder v. Gates, 688 F.Supp. 1418 (C.D.Cal.1988). Both parties appealed. The Ninth Circuit reversed and remanded. Corder v. Gates (Corder I), 947 F.2d 374 (9th Cir.1991). On remand, the district court awarded plaintiffs-appellees $240,695 in attorney's fees and denied defendant-appellant's request for an offset. Defendant-appellant appeals. We have jurisdiction pursuant to 28 U.S.C. Sec. 1291. We remand in part, and reverse and remand in part.

I.

The underlying lawsuit was brought by two elderly women against 41 individual law enforcement officers, two counties and two cities for violating their civil rights, pursuant to 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983. Specifically, plaintiffs alleged that at 3:00 a.m. on January 18, 1985, defendants improperly entered and searched plaintiffs' residence, detained plaintiffs for five hours, tear gassed the residence and shot out a ceiling. Defendant-appellant Roy Brown, then the commander of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department SWAT Team, authorized the entry of plaintiffs' residence. Defendants were searching for an escaped prisoner for whom they held a commitment order. Although it is undisputed that defendants had probable cause to believe that the escaped prisoner was in the residence, defendants did not attempt to obtain a valid search warrant. Instead, defendants entered on the basis of the commitment order. Plaintiffs sought $1,000,000 in On September 30, 1985, defendants offered plaintiffs $45,000 to settle. The settlement offer provided $6,000 in damages and $39,000 for attorney's fees which had accrued at that point. Plaintiff Lombardo accepted the offer, but plaintiff Corder rejected it. ¹

compensatory damages and $1,000,000 in punitive damages against each defendant.

Several defendants moved for and were granted summary judgment. At trial, plaintiffs achieved limited success against the remaining defendants, prevailing over only three law enforcement officers and recovering only minimal dollar amounts. Specifically, the jury awarded plaintiffs $2 in compensatory damages and $7,500 in punitive damages against one defendant; $2 in compensatory damages and $15,000 in punitive damages against a second defendant; and $2 in compensatory damages and $1,500 in punitive damages against defendant-appellant. Total compensatory and punitive damages amounted to $24,006. The other defendants were found to be shielded from liability by qualified immunity.

Plaintiffs then moved for attorney's fees under 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1988. ² The district court awarded plaintiffs $90,333 in attorney's fees. The district court found that the initial lodestar figure of $112,916 should be reduced by 20% to reflect plaintiffs' limited success in light of plaintiffs' rejection of the $45,000 settlement offer.

Two of the three defendants who were found liable settled with plaintiffs. Defendant-appellant appealed. He argued that the initial lodestar figure should have been reduced by more than 20%, given plaintiffs' very limited success. Defendant-appellant also argued that the district court should have offset the attorney's fee award by the amount already paid by the other two defendants through settlement. Defendant-appellant stressed that otherwise plaintiffs would receive an improper windfall. Plaintiffs cross-appealed. Plaintiffs argued that the initial lodestar figure should not have been reduced at all, regardless of their limited success.

This court reversed the order of the district court. Corder I, 947 F.2d at 374. The court held that it was clearly erroneous for the district court to reduce the initial lodestar figure because plaintiffs had previously rejected the $45,000 settlement offer. Id. at 380-81. But, the court noted that it was not entirely clear that the district court had based the 20% reduction solely on plaintiffs' rejection of the settlement offer. Thus, the court remanded to the district court for clarification. Id. at 381.

This court also found that it was unable to determine whether the district court should have offset the attorney's fee award by the amount already paid by the other two defendants through settlement. The court stated, "We face a record that is entirely devoid of information about these alleged post-trial settlements; we have little information about either the number of settlements that have taken place, or the amount of these settlements." Id. at 383. Thus, the court remanded for further proceedings. Id.

On April 21, 1992, the district court conducted a hearing at which plaintiffs conceded that they had settled with the other two defendants who were found liable. But, plaintiffs noted that they deliberately did not allocate the settlement amounts between damages and attorney's fees because they wanted to avoid an offset by defendant-appellant. Furthermore, plaintiffs argued that they would not disclose the terms of the settlement agreements because the agreements were confidential.

The district court judge questioned whether she had authority to "pierce through a settlement agreement which was negotiated among the parties." She observed, "When there is a settlement and it is a negotiated settlement for a lump sum figure and there is On September 8, 1992, the district court entered a new order, awarding $240,695 in attorney's fees. First, the district court judge acknowledged that this court had rejected the sole factor upon which she had reduced the initial lodestar figure. But, instead of simply restoring the amount reduced and awarding plaintiffs interest on the judgment, the district court judge recalculated the entire award using the current hourly rate of plaintiffs' attorney in order to compensate for the delay in payment caused by the appeal. Next, she awarded plaintiffs attorney's fees for services rendered during the previous appeal and subsequent remand. Finally, the district court judge found that she was not required to reach the offset issue. First, there was no controlling authority mandating an offset. Second, defendant-appellant had not provided her with specific evidence that she could use to calculate the requested offset. She noted, "[Defendant-appellant] has presented no documentation which would indicate how much of the settlements should be allocated to fees, and thus how much should be offset from the amount owed by [defendant-appellant]."

                no allocation, why should the court get into the act?   I[ ] just simply have to award attorney fees based upon reasonable attorney fees for the case."
                

On September 23, 1992, defendant-appellant filed a timely notice of appeal.

II.

The district court's award of attorney's fees under 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1988 is reviewed for an abuse of discretion. Hensley v. Eckerhart, 461 U.S. 424, 437, 103 S.Ct. 1933, 1941, 76 L.Ed.2d 40 (1983). Any elements of legal analysis which figure in the district court's decision are, however, subject to de novo review. Hall v. Bolger, 768 F.2d 1148, 1150 (9th Cir.1985).

III.

A. REDUCTION FOR LIMITED SUCCESS

Defendant-appellant contends that the district court abused its discretion in awarding plaintiffs full attorney's fees, given plaintiffs' very limited success. Defendant-appellant emphasizes that plaintiffs recovered only $24,006 out of the $1,000,000 they originally sought. Furthermore, only three defendants out of the 45 named in the complaint were found liable.

Defendant-appellant relies primarily on Farrar v. Hobby, --- U.S. ----, 113 S.Ct. 566, 121 L.Ed.2d 494 (1992). In Farrar, a plaintiff had sought $17 million in damages from six defendants, but was awarded only $1 in damages against one defendant. Nonetheless, the district court awarded $280,000 in Sec. 1988 attorney's fees. The Court reversed, holding that the plaintiff was not entitled to attorney's fees. Id. at ----, 113 S.Ct. at 575. The Court explained that the most critical factor in determining the reasonableness of an attorney's fee award is the degree of success the plaintiff achieved. Id. at ----, 113 S.Ct. at 574; see Hensley, 461 U.S. at 440, 103 S.Ct. at 1943 ("[T]he extent of a plaintiff's success is a crucial factor in determining the proper amount of an award of attorney's fees under 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1988."). Having obtained only one-seventeen-millionth of what the plaintiff sought after ten years of litigation, which included two trips to the Court of Appeals, any award would be unreasonable. Farrar, --- U.S. at ----, 113 S.Ct. at 575; id. at 575 (O'Connor, J., concurring). Accordingly, defendant-appellant concludes that similarly, full attorney's fees would be unreasonable here, given that plaintiffs obtained only a small fraction of what they originally sought. See also Hensley, 461 U.S. at 440, 103 S.Ct. at 1943 ("A reduced fee award is appropriate if the relief, however significant, is limited in comparison to the scope of the litigation as a whole.").

We agree. We remand to provide the district court the opportunity to reconsider the issue in light of Farrar which was not yet decided when the district court issued its September 1992 order. The district court should "focus on the significance of the overall relief obtained by the plaintiff in relation to the hours reasonably expended on the litigation."...