Crispin-Taveras v. Municipality of Carolina
| Decision Date | 21 March 2012 |
| Docket Number | Civil No. 07-2017 (JAF) |
| Parties | YONATTA CRISPIN-TAVERAS, Plaintiff, v. MUNICIPALITY OF CAROLINA, et al., Defendants. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — District of Puerto Rico |
Before this court is the Report and Recommendation (Docket No. 227), regarding Plaintiff's motion for attorney's fees and costs against Defendants (Docket Nos. 204; 205.) Having considered the magistrate judge's recommendations and the parties' objections (Docket Nos. 227; 228; 229; 230; 231), we modify in part and adopt in part the Report and Recommendation.
Plaintiff brought suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 seeking damages arising from an incident of police brutality. On October 15, 2009, a jury rendered a verdict favorable to Plaintiff against the Municipality of Carolina in the amount of $35,000 and against five individual codefendants, in the amount of $10,000 each. (Docket No. 160.) Plaintiff, as a prevailing party under § 1983, moved for attorney's fees under § 1988 and for costs under Local Rule of Civil Procedure 54(d).(Docket Nos. 204; 205.) Plaintiff's three attorneys seek fees for this case at the following rates: Emilio Solé ("Solé") requests compensation at $150 per hour; Mauricio Hernández-Arroyo ("Hernández") requests $300 per hour for out-of-court work and $350 per hour for in-court work; and Linda George ("George") requests $350 per hour for out-of-court work and $400 per hour for in-court work. (Docket Nos. 205; 227.) Defendants did not oppose, and we referred the motion for fees to the magistrate judge on February 7, 2012. (Docket No. 225.) Magistrate Judge Silvia Carreño-Coll issued a report and recommendation on February 21, 2012, recommending a reduced award of fees. (Docket No. 227.) All three of Plaintiff's attorneys, in addition to Defendants, oppose the report and recommendation. (Docket Nos. 228; 229; 230; 231.)
A district court may refer a motion for attorney's fees to a United States magistrate judge for disposition. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 54(d)(2)(D); see also 28 U.S.C. §636(b)(1)(B); Fed. R. Civ. P. 72(b); D.P.R. L.Civ.R. 72(a). Any party adversely affected by the report and recommendation may file written objections within fourteen days of being served with the magistrate judge's report. §636(b)(1)(C). A party that files a timely objection is entitled to a de-novo determination of "those portions of the report or specified proposed findings or recommendations to which specific objection is made." Sylva v. Culebra Dive Shop, 389 F.Supp. 2d 189, 191 (D.P.R. 2005) (citing United States v. Raddatz, 447 U.S. 667, 673 (1980)).Failure to comply with this rule precludes further review. See Davet v. Maccarone, 973 F.2d 22, 30-31 (1st Cir. 1992). Moreover, the "district court need not consider frivolous, conclusive, or general objections." Colon-Crescioni v. De Palmas, 697 F. Supp. 2d 254, 256 (D.P.R. 2010) (quoting Rivera-Garcia v. United States, Civ. No. 06-1004, 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 60305, *1 (D.P.R. Aug. 7, 2008)). To the extent that a party's "objections amount to no more than general or conclusory objections to the report and recommendation, without specifying to which issues in the report the party is objecting, or where the objections are repetitive of the arguments already made to the magistrate, a de novo review is unwarranted," and we review for clear error. Id. (internal quotation marks and citations omitted) In conducting its review, the court is free to "accept, reject, or modify, in whole or in part, the findings or recommendations made by the magistrate judge." § 636(b)(1)(c). Furthermore, the court may accept those parts of the report and recommendation to which the parties do not object. Hernández-Mejias v. GE, 428 F.Supp.2d 4, 6 (D.P.R. 2005) (citing Lacedra v. Donald W. Wyatt Det. Facility, 334 F. Supp.2d 114, 125 (D.R.I. 2004)).
II.
In order to award attorney's fees under 42 U.S.C. § 1988, or costs under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 54(d), a court first must determine that the requesting party is "prevailing." A party is found "prevailing" where it "succeeded on an important issue in the case, therebygaining at least some of the benefit he sought in bringing suit." See Gay Officers Action League v. Puerto Rico, 247 F.3d 288, 293 (1st Cir. 2001) (citing Hensley v. Eckerhart, 461 U.S. 424, 433 (1983)).
Next, the court must determine that the requested fees are "reasonable." § 1988. Fees are presumptively reasonable where the requesting party has multiplied a reasonable hourly rate by the number of hours reasonably spent on litigation. See Gay Officers Action League, 247 F.3d at 295 (citing Hensley, 461 U.S. at 433). The First Circuit has adopted the "lodestar approach," in which "the trial judge must determine 'the number of hours reasonably expended on the litigation multiplied by a reasonable hourly rate.'" Id. (citing Hensley, 461 U.S. at 433)). In the lodestar method, "the judge calculates the time counsel spent on the case, subtracts duplicative, unproductive, or excessive hours, and then applies prevailing rates in the community (taking into account the qualifications, experience, and specialized competence of the attorneys involved)." Id. (citing Lipsett v. Blanco, 975 F.2d 934, 937 (1st Cir. 1992)). The logged hours are reasonably spent on litigation unless "duplicative, unproductive, or excessive." Id. In addition, after calculation of the initial "amount of the award, attorney's fees may be reduced because of (1) the overstaffing of a case, (2) the excessiveness of the hours expended on the legal research or the discovery proceedings, (3) the redundancy of the work exercised, or (4) the time spent on needless or unessential matters." Serrano v. Ritz-Carlton San Juan Hotel Spa & Casino, 808 F. Supp. 2d 393, 398 (D.P.R. 2011) (quoting Ramos v. Davis & Geck, Inc., 968 F. Supp. 765, 775 (D.P.R. 1997)) (internal quotation marks omitted)).
All three of Plaintiff's attorneys, in addition to Defendants, have objected to the report and recommendation. We discuss the objections in turn and, for the reasons below, adopt most of the magistrate's recommendations, modifying the recommended fee award by an increase of $45.00.
The magistrate judge recommended a reduction of thirty-five hours in Solé's total hours based on ambiguity in the entries from May to September 2007, which created confusion as to whether the billed time stemmed from his representation in Plaintiff's Commonwealth criminal case or in the federal civil case. In addition, the magistrate recommended a global reduction in Solé's hours by forty percent based on time billed in half-hour increments, block billing, and duplicative or excessive billed time. (Docket No. 227 at 3.) First, Solé argues that six of the entries from May through September 2007 reflected work done in the civil case but, after review of the entries, we find that only one half-hour entry on February 28, 2007, for legal research on police brutality, unambiguously pertains to the civil case at bar.1
Next, Solé argues that there were only fifteen entries in half-hour increments, and such a practice should not lead to a reduction. But the smallest unit of billed time appearing on histime sheet was a half-hour increment, and his argument misses the mark. The "reduction was not imposed because the [magistrate] found billing in [half-hour] increments per se unreasonable, but because" in this case it led to an inflation of hours; Solé made several half-hour entries for small tasks such as sending faxes, sending emails, coordinating meetings with other attorneys,2 and making phone calls in half-hour "increments when the actual task would have taken a negligible amount of time." Diffenderfer v. Gomez-Colon, 587 F.3d 445, 455 (1st Cir. 2009).
Finally, in a single sentence without any legal citations, Solé contests the magistrate's finding that much of the time billed for meetings and phone conferences was excessive or duplicative. (Docket No. 228 at 3.) He points to the Defendants' numerous attorneys and offices (overlooking the fact that the case was originally filed by one plaintiff against twelve defendants); he also argues that this "was not an easy case" because the litigation was "hotly contested" and because the First Circuit acknowledges three standards of liability in § 1983 cases. (Docket No. 228 at 3-4.) We reject this argument. An attorney who tries civil rights cases in the First Circuit should be familiar with those standards,3 and while this court often encourages settlement, asking an attorney who has retained a case to proceed to trial is not an unusual request. In addition, Plaintiff retained the three attorneys in very early stages of thelitigation before the adversary process had even heated up, and we agree with the magistrate that "there was no obvious need for three attorneys" in this relatively straightforward police brutality case. (Docket No. 227.) Based on the above reasoning, we find no error in the magistrate's recommended forty percent reduction, but we will increase his total number of billed hours to include the half-hour of legal research on police brutality on February 21, 2007, (discounted by forty percent) awarding him a total of $20,115.4
Judge Carreño-Coll recommended awarding George fees at the same rate as Hernández—$225 per hour for work out of court—based on the market rate in this district and her experience. However, the magistrate judge reduced George's number of hours to forty-two, after finding several inconsistencies, errors, vagueness, and other problems plaguing her time sheets. (Docket No. 227 at 4-7.) Although George does not contest the recommended hourly rate, she does contest the reduction in hours.
First, George alleges that she authored all pleadings in this case including the complaint, and that she did not construct her time sheet after...
To continue reading
Request your trial