In re Wilson

Citation277 A.3d 940
Decision Date07 July 2022
Docket Number19-PR-1203
Parties IN RE Mary WILSON; Bruce E. Gardner, Appellant.
CourtCourt of Appeals of Columbia District

Bruce E. Gardner, pro se.*

Before Beckwith and McLeese, Associate Judges, and Thompson,** Senior Judge.

Beckwith, Associate Judge:

Appellant Bruce Gardner challenges the trial court's order denying a substantial portion of his request for compensation for guardianship services he provided to Mary Wilson. We remand the case for further proceedings.

I.

Bruce Gardner was appointed as guardian for Mary Wilson in July of 2016. This appeal involves Mr. Gardner's third petition for fees pertaining to his guardianship of Ms. Wilson—this one seeking compensation for services he provided from July 2018 to July 2019. Specifically, Mr. Gardner sought $9,108.00 in fees for 100.9 hours billed at $90 per hour and costs of $347.78. The trial court awarded Mr. Gardner $6,400.35 in fees and $206.65 in costs after determining that some of Mr. Gardner's requests were excessive and that others stemmed from noncompensable tasks. The trial court denied his motion for reconsideration, and Mr. Gardner now appeals to this court.

II.

The compensation of court-appointed guardians is governed by D.C. Code § 21-2060 (2012 Repl. & 2022 Supp.) and implemented by Superior Court Probate Rule 308. In re Brown , 211 A.3d 165, 167 (D.C. 2019). In relevant part, the statute states that "[a]s approved by order of the court," an attorney "is entitled to compensation for services rendered either in a guardianship proceeding, protective proceeding, or in connection with a guardianship or protective arrangement." D.C. Code § 21-2060(a). A guardian seeking compensation must file a petition setting forth "in reasonable detail" the amount of time spent on services, the basis of any hourly rates, and "the character and summary of the service rendered." Super. Ct. Prob. R. 308(b)(1). The trial court must then determine whether the compensation request is reasonable. Id. "We review the denial of a compensation request for abuse of discretion and review the underlying legal principles de novo." In re Robinson , 216 A.3d 887, 890 (D.C. 2019). We will remand where the trial court has made insufficient factual findings or failed to adequately explain the bases for its conclusions. See In re Estate of McDaniel , 953 A.2d 1021, 1023–24 (D.C. 2008).

A. Travel

Approximately a quarter of the total amount Mr. Gardner requested in his fee petition was for the time he spent traveling from his home office in Bowie, Maryland, to locations in the District where he met with Ms. Wilson, primarily at Serenity Rehabilitation and Health Center, which is on the Maryland border in southeast D.C. The trial court agreed that Mr. Gardner was entitled to be compensated at a rate of $90 an hour from the Guardianship Fund "for reasonable and necessary travel,"2 but the court reduced by half the $2,175.30 Mr. Gardner had requested for such travel because the court "require[d] attorneys to calculate travel from their District of Columbia offices, when they live or have offices outside of the District of Columbia, or otherwise from the Courthouse." In the court's view, Mr. Gardner's expenditures "seem[ed] excessive" given that Mr. Gardner took eight-tenths of an hour to travel 21 miles from Bowie to Serenity when the distance from Mr. Gardner's District of Columbia office to Serenity was roughly 8 miles. The court noted that requiring time to be calculated from an attorney's D.C. office address was consistent with the guidelines governing the compensation of attorneys appointed to represent indigent criminal defendants under the Criminal Justice Act (CJA),3 which state, in relevant part, that "[w]here travel time to a destination from an attorney's home or office is greater than the time from the courthouse to that destination, the attorney is only entitled to the lesser of those times."

Mr. Gardner challenges the trial court's decision to reduce by 50 percent his compensation request for time and mileage spent traveling and, in particular, the court's reliance upon the CJA guidelines in computing guardians’ travel time. Mr. Gardner contends that travel time and mileage should be computed from his home office for numerous reasons—including that his D.C. address is not an actual office but only a mailing address; that other judges addressing earlier fee petitions in this case have granted requests for fees based on travel time from Mr. Gardner's home office in Bowie (and that the judge in this case also did so in a different guardianship matter); that Bowie is within an area—the Washington metropolitan area—that is deemed to be local in various other relevant contexts; that it does not make sense to apply CJA guidelines to guardians who, unlike criminal defense lawyers, do not typically do their jobs at the courthouse; and that it actually would have cost more if he traveled to visit Ms. Wilson from his D.C. address or the courthouse because he would take public transportation from Bowie into the District and from there, using Uber or taking the Metro to visit Ms. Wilson would either have cost more or taken more time than driving from Bowie.

Ideally, people appointed to be guardians would be able to consult uniform rules and policies in preparing their petitions for fees from the Guardianship Fund. They would know what categories of costs and fees the court will and will not compensate.4 The Superior Court as yet has no rules of this sort for computing travel, and the trial court here looked to the CJA guidelines. It gave specific reasons for using the CJA guidelines to measure travel time and mileage, noting that the guidelines’ concern about subsidizing attorneys who live far away from the District was consistent with the court's "general obligation to ensure that the taxpayer funded Guardianship Fund is tapped responsibly." We do not endorse the full-fledged adoption of CJA guidelines in guardianship matters. Yet in the absence of specific guidelines geared explicitly to appointed guardians, we are also not inclined to conclude that a trial court's consideration of the CJA guidelines as a relevant analogy for evaluating the reasonableness of travel expenses is an abuse of discretion.

A remand is nevertheless in order for several reasons. First, although the trial court was unwilling to guess how long it would have taken Mr. Gardner to travel to Serenity from an address in the District,5 it is difficult for us to evaluate the reasonableness of its ruling in this regard without a better understanding of its decision to reduce the expenditures by half, rather than by some other number, and without an explanation of whether and how this reduction affects the submitted costs for mileage.6 It is also unclear how the trial court determined Mr. Gardner's travel time from Maryland was the "greater" under the CJA guidelines. Mr. Gardner's contention that his travel expenses from Bowie to Serenity were less than what they would have been from his D.C. address or the courthouse to Serenity seems relevant to the assessment required by the CJA guidelines the court purported to rely on.

Second and relatedly, because the trial judge here has in at least one other case granted Mr. Gardner's petition for fees and costs for travel to and from an office in Prince George's County,7 the court should clarify the reasoning underlying its reliance upon the CJA guidelines in some cases and not others.8 "Without such an explanation, our court cannot assess whether the Superior Court reasonably exercised its discretion." In re Gardner , 268 A.3d 850, 859 (D.C. 2022).

And finally, it is unclear to what extent the trial court relied upon a possibly inaccurate factual conclusion—namely, that Mr. Gardner has an office on Pennsylvania Avenue in the District of Columbia. See In re Mary Wilson , No. INT 380-08, at 2 (D.C. Super. Ct. Sept. 17, 2019) (stating that "Mr. Gardner has a District of Columbia office located at 1101 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20004"). According to Mr. Gardner, he has an arrangement to receive mail at the Pennsylvania Avenue address but has no physical office there and does not work there.9 The trial court appeared to assume Mr. Gardner had an actual office in D.C. that he could work out of, and we are unsure whether and to what extent the court's ruling would have been affected by information that Mr. Gardner's home office in Bowie was his only office that functioned as an office. The court should clarify this on remand.

B. Time Spent on Other Tasks

Mr. Gardner also argues that the probate court erred in denying him compensation for the time he spent preparing summaries of services he performed and the time he took to electronically file several documents over the course of the year for which he was seeking fees. His fee petition contained nine entries involving the summaries, totaling 12.8 hours of work at a rate of $90 per hour for a total of $1152. For seven of the nine entries, Mr. Gardner described them as "prepared summary of description of services provided to date."10 Mr. Gardner further requested $18 for each instance in which he spent two-tenths of an hour electronically filing (1) his fifth guardianship report on December 31, 2018; (2) his sixth guardianship report on July 2, 2019; and (3) his fee petition on July 5, 2019.

With respect to the summaries, the trial court found that their compilation was a clerical, noncompensable task and that Mr. Gardner's method of updating his files was "excessive and redundant." As to electronic filing, the court ruled that Mr. Gardner would properly be compensated for the costs associated with filing (such as the filing fee), but that the time spent actually performing the electronic filing was a clerical act that in the court's view was noncompensable.11 In reaching this conclusion, the trial court relied upon the unpublished (and nonprecedential) decision in In re...

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2 cases
  • In re Cannon
    • United States
    • D.C. Court of Appeals
    • July 21, 2022
    ...or standards stating that the Probate Division of the Superior Court follows the CJA Guidelines. See In re Wilson , No. 19-PR-1203, 277 A.3d 940, 944 (D.C. Jul. 7, 2022) (acknowledging the absence of any guidelines and observing that, "ideally, people appointed to be guardians would be able......
  • In re Robinson
    • United States
    • D.C. Court of Appeals
    • August 18, 2022
    ...rate at which Mr. Gardner should be compensated for the tasks the trial court deemed to be non-legal. See, e.g. , In re Wilson , 277 A.3d 940, 947 (D.C. July 7, 2022) (remanding for trial court "to determine the reasonableness of the requested compensation" for administrative tasks).III. De......

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