Gonzalez v. City of Maywood

• Decision Date: 09 September 2013
• Docket Number: No. 11–56594.,11–56594.
• Citation: 729 F.3d 1196
• Parties: Martin GONZALEZ, Sr.; Martin Gonzalez, Jr.; Jose Gonzalez; Martha Hernandez; Krystal Hernandez; Monique Paniagua; Jose Quinones; Jesse Castro; Jose Molina; Vanessa Garcia; Shannon Board; Manuel Herrera; Humberto Herrera; Gerardina Herrera; Freddie Barajas; Marvin Tejeda; Jesus Jimenez; Eder Jimenez; Jordan Payan; Pablo Camarillo, Plaintiffs–Appellants, v. CITY OF MAYWOOD; Maywood–Cudahy Police Department; Bruce Leflar; Paul Pine; Cunningham, Officer; Florez, Officer; West, Officer; Viscarra, Officer, Defendants–Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Ninth Circuit

729 F.3d 1196

Martin GONZALEZ, Sr.; Martin Gonzalez, Jr.; Jose Gonzalez; Martha Hernandez; Krystal Hernandez; Monique Paniagua; Jose Quinones; Jesse Castro; Jose Molina; Vanessa Garcia; Shannon Board; Manuel Herrera; Humberto Herrera; Gerardina Herrera; Freddie Barajas; Marvin Tejeda; Jesus Jimenez; Eder Jimenez; Jordan Payan; Pablo Camarillo, Plaintiffs–Appellants,

v.CITY OF MAYWOOD; Maywood–Cudahy Police Department; Bruce Leflar; Paul Pine; Cunningham, Officer; Florez, Officer; West, Officer; Viscarra, Officer, Defendants–Appellees.

No. 11–56594.

United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit.

Argued and Submitted June 4, 2013.

Filed Sept. 9, 2013.

Paul L. Hoffman (argued) and Catherine Sweetser, Schonbrun, DeSimone, Seplow, Harris, Hoffman & Harrison, LLP, Venice, California; Cynthia Anderson–Barker, Law Office of Cynthia Anderson–Barker, Los Angeles, California; Robert Mann and Donald W. Cook, Attorneys at Law, Los Angeles, California; Ellen Hammill Ellison, Law Office of Ellen Hammill Ellison, Los Angeles, California; Olu K. Orange, Orange Law Offices, Los Angeles, California, for Plaintiffs–Appellants.

Richard A. Semon (argued) and Lee A. Wood, The Aguilera Law Group, APLC, Costa Mesa, California, for Defendants–Appellees City of Maywood, et al.

Brian P. Keighron (argued), Wisotsky, Procter & Shyer, Oxnard, California, for Defendants–Appellees Cunningham and Muriello.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Central District of California Otis D. Wright, II, District Judge, Presiding.

Before: RONALD M. GOULD and N. RANDY SMITH, Circuit Judges, and SHARON L. GLEASON, District Judge.^*

OPINION

N.R. SMITH, Circuit Judge:

42 U.S.C. § 1988 authorizes district courts to award the prevailing party in civil rights litigation a “reasonable attorney's fee.” Several important principles bear on the district court's determination of a reasonable fee amount. First, the court must compute the fee award using an hourly rate that is based on the “prevailing market rates in the relevant community.” Dang v. Cross, 422 F.3d 800, 813 (9th Cir.2005). Second, when a district court reduces either the number of hours or the lodestar by a certain percentage greater than 10%, it must provide a clear and concise explanation for why it chose the specific percentage to apply. See Gates v. Deukmejian, 987 F.2d 1392, 1398 (9th Cir.1992); Moreno v. City of Sacramento, 534 F.3d 1106, 1112 (9th Cir.2008). Finally, it is not per se unreasonable for the prevailing party in a civil rights case to be awarded an amount of attorney's fees that exceeds the amount of money recovered by his or her client. Because the district court did not apply these principles when determining the amount of Plaintiffs' attorney's fee award, we must vacate and remand.

BACKGROUND

The dispute over attorney's fees in this appeal arises from the settlement of numerous civil rights lawsuits against the City of Maywood, its police department, and several local government officials (collectively, the “City”). On August 19, 2010, following a successful mediation of eight such lawsuits, the parties entered into a Stipulation for Settlement (the “Stipulation”). ¹ Under the terms of the Stipulation, Plaintiffs would receive $500,000 total. The Stipulation also provided that Plaintiffs could apply to the district court for attorney's fees. However, the Stipulation limited any fee award to $1,000,000 for work on the merits, and $25,000 for work on the fee application.

On November 12, 2010, Plaintiffs filed a fee application in the district court for the Central District of California. Plaintiffs' initial application computed their lodestar amount as $1,455,339 for work both on the merits and on the fee application. Because this amount exceeded the amount the Stipulation authorized, Plaintiffs requested a fee of $1,025,000. The City filed an opposition to Plaintiffs' fee application on December 6, 2010.

The City's opposition identified a mathematical error in Plaintiffs' computation of their lodestar. An inadvertently placed decimal point in the sub-total for attorney Anderson–Barker's fee produced a lodestar amount that was nearly $500,000 less than it should have been. Plaintiffs filed a supplemental declaration acknowledging this error one day after the City filed its opposition.

Later, Plaintiffs identified a second error in their initial lodestar computation. In a declaration filed along with their reply to the City's opposition to the motion for attorney's fees, Plaintiffs indicated that the arithmetic function in their word processing software had miscalculated the total number of hours attorney Ellison had worked on the case. Thus, although Plaintiffs' motion for attorney's fees claimed Ellison had worked 411.54 hours, correcting the computation error showed that she had actually worked 636.7 hours.

After correcting the errors in Ellison's and Anderson–Barker's billings, Plaintiffs computed their lodestar to be $2,059,451.50. Nevertheless, this adjustment did not affect Plaintiffs' ultimate contention that they were entitled to receive $1,025,000 in fees—the maximum amount permitted by the Stipulation.

On January 24, 2011, the district court held a hearing on the attorney's fee award. At the hearing, the district court indicated that it would not award fees in excess of the $500,000 that Plaintiffs had recovered:

This is offensive on its face. I have got a summary here of the various, we will call it indignities suffered by each of the plaintiffs and what their settlements have been, and then I look at the attorney's fees request and it literally shocks the conscience.

Let me cut to the chase. If it were flipped, if what is being divided up among the plaintiffs is what the attorneys are asking for in compensation, fine. I would approve that. And then the attorneys get what you have given to your clients, that would get approved.

Now, I understand that you have already convinced each of these plaintiffs to go along with whatever, and that is fine. They are free to contract as they wish. They are free to resolve and compromise their claims on any terms they want, but to the extent that you come in here seeking approval of these attorney's fees, that is not going to happen. All right....

I have said what I have got to say on this issue. And I felt this all along, if the numbers were flipped, if the injured plaintiffs had received the lion's share of this money, fine, I would have no problem. But I will not approve this. We are done.

Consistent with this position, the district court partially granted Plaintiffs' motion for attorney's fees in a twenty-five page order on August 22, 2011, and awarded $473,138.24 in fees. Plaintiffs timely appealed on September 13, 2011.

STANDARD OF REVIEW

“District court awards of attorney's fees under section 1988 are reviewed for abuse of discretion.” Corder v. Gates, 947 F.2d 374, 377 (9th Cir.1991). Accordingly, “[w]e review the district court's calculation of the reasonable hours and the hourly rate for abuse of discretion.” Costa v. Comm'r of Soc. Security Admin., 690 F.3d 1132, 1135 (9th Cir.2012) (internal quotation marks omitted). Under this standard of review, we “affirm unless the district court applied the wrong legal standard or its findings were illogical, implausible or without support in the record.” TrafficSchool.com, Inc. v. Edriver Inc., 653 F.3d 820, 832 (9th Cir.2011).

DISCUSSION

42 U.S.C. § 1988(b) authorizes district courts to award the “prevailing party,” in any suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, a “reasonable attorney's fee.” The City does not dispute that the Plaintiffs in this case were prevailing parties for purposes of § 1988. See Carbonell v. INS, 429 F.3d 894, 899 (9th Cir.2005) (“[W]e have also found that a litigant prevailed when he entered into a legally enforceable settlement agreement.”).

Plaintiffs contend that the district court erred in determining the fee award by (1) erroneously applying across-the-board cuts to the lodestar, (2) failing to find a reasonable hourly rate on which to compute the lodestar, (3) declining to award a state-law multiplier, and (4) declining to award fees for work performed on the fee application. We agree that the district court erred in these four respects and therefore vacate the fee award and remand.

To determine the amount of a reasonable fee under § 1988, district courts typically proceed in two steps. First, courts generally “apply ... the ‘lodestar’ method to determine what constitutes a reasonable attorney's fee.” Costa, 690 F.3d at 1135;Morales v. City of San Rafael, 96 F.3d 359, 363 (9th Cir.1996); Ballen v. City of Redmond, 466 F.3d 736, 746 (9th Cir.2006). Second, “[t]he district court may then adjust [the lodestar] upward or downward based on a variety of factors.” Moreno, 534 F.3d at 1111. We address these steps in sequence.

I. Computation of the Lodestar

Under the lodestar method, the district court “multiplies the number of hours the prevailing party reasonably expended on the litigation by a reasonable hourly rate.” Ballen, 466 F.3d at 746 (internal quotation marks omitted); Hensley v. Eckerhart, 461 U.S. 424, 433, 103 S.Ct. 1933, 76 L.Ed.2d 40 (1983). The product of this computation—the “lodestar figure”—is a “presumptively reasonable” fee under 42 U.S.C. § 1988. See Ballen, 466 F.3d at 746. We address the district court's analysis of the number of hours and hourly rates in turn.

A. Reasonable Number of Hours

A district court, using the lodestar method to determine the amount of attorney's fees to award, must determine a reasonable number of hours for which the prevailing party should be compensated. See, e.g., Fischer v. SJB–P.D. Inc., 214 F.3d 1115, 1119 (9th Cir.2000). Ultimately, a “reasonable” number of hours equals “[t]he number of hours ... [which] could reasonably have been billed to a private client.” Moreno, 534 F.3d at 1111. The prevailing party has the burden of submitting billing records to establish that the number of hours it...