Jordan v. U.S. Dept. of Justice

• Decision Date: 05 October 1982
• Docket Number: No. 81-1380,81-1380
• Parties: , 223 U.S.App.D.C. 325 William JORDAN, Appellant, v. UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — District of Columbia Circuit

Page 514

691 F.2d 514

73 A.L.R.Fed. 715, 223 U.S.App.D.C. 325

William JORDAN, Appellant, v. UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE.

No. 81-1380.

United States Court of Appeals District of Columbia Circuit.

Argued Dec. 4, 1981.

Decided Oct. 5, 1982.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Columbia (D.C. Civil Action No. 76-00276).

Michael B. Trister, Washington, D. C., with whom Richard A. Lowe, Washington, D. C., was on the brief, for appellant.

Rebecca L. Ross, Asst. U. S. Atty., Washington, D. C., with whom Charles F. C. Ruff, U. S. Atty., Washington, D. C., at the time the brief was filed, Royce C. Lamberth and Kenneth M. Raisler, Asst. U. S. Attys., Washington, D. C., were on the brief, for appellee.

Before ROBINSON, Chief Judge, and WRIGHT and TAMM, Circuit Judges.

Opinion for the Court filed by Chief Judge ROBINSON.

SPOTTSWOOD W. ROBINSON, III, Chief Judge:

This appeal protests an order of the District Court wholly denying appellant's motion for attorneys' fees claimed as an entitlement of successful Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) ¹ litigation. ² Finding this disposition beyond the pale of sound judicial discretion, we reverse the order and remand the case to the District Court for further proceedings.

I

Appellant, while a student at Georgetown University Law Center, sought from the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia access to all charging manuals, rules and guidelines setting forth standards for the exercise of prosecutorial discretion in criminal matters. The Department of Justice refused this request and appellant, invoking FOIA, sued in the District Court. ³ The Department contended that the material desired was shielded by Exemption 5. ⁴ After pursuing discovery, appellant moved for partial summary judgment, arguing that the withholding of a papering and screening manual and a set of guidelines for first-offender treatment violated FOIA's disclosure mandate. ⁵ In response, the Department released all but ten paragraphs of the manual, ⁶ and subsequently moved, on the basis of Exemptions 2 and 5, ⁷ alternatively for dismissal or partial summary judgment as to the excised manual paragraphs and the guidelines.

The District Court rejected the Department's Exemptions 2 and 5 defenses, ⁸ and granted appellant's partial-summary-judgment motion on the ground that release of the contested data was required by FOIA. ⁹ The Department appealed, ¹⁰ and this court, sitting en banc, similarly found unacceptable the Department's Exemptions 2 and 5 arguments, ¹¹ and held that the withheld material was subject to mandatory disclosure. ¹²

Subsequently, appellant moved for an award of attorneys' fees. ¹³ The motion sought approximately $17,000 for 420 hours of work, all performed by the legal staff of the Institute for Public Representation at Georgetown University Law Center. ¹⁴ The application requested compensation at hourly rates of $125 for the Institute's director who was lead counsel for appellant, $55 for one senior attorney, $40 for each of two staff attorneys or "fellows," and $15 apiece for four student interns. ¹⁵ In support of the motion, appellant submitted the director's affidavit recounting the time spent by each attorney and intern on major phases of the litigation, ¹⁶ the affidavit of the associate director of the Institute setting forth the hours devoted by a student intern and himself to negotiations with the Department on fees and preparation of the fee application, ¹⁷ and the affidavit of a partner in a local law firm attesting, on the basis of personal knowledge, to the reasonableness of the hourly rates claimed. ¹⁸

Ruling on appellant's motion, ¹⁹ the District Court first held that he had "substantially prevailed" within the meaning of FOIA's attorneys' fee provision. ²⁰ The court then summoned the test established by this court for governance of FOIA fee allowances, ²¹ and concluded that it was satisfied and that an award of fees was therefore permissible. ²² However, in a purported exercise of discretion, the court refused to grant any fees at all, on the ground that appellant's request was "enormously excessive and unreasonable," ²³ and was vitiated by "shoddy documentation as to the hours worked, the unsubstantiated claim for any hourly fee of One Hundred Twenty-Five Dollars ($125) for (the Institute's director) and unprecedented and unsupportable claims for attorneys' fees for the work done by uncompensated (student interns). ²⁴ It is this action that we now review.

II

The basic framework for consideration and computation of attorneys' fee awards was constructed in our opinion in Copeland v. Marshall. ²⁵ We there adopted a market-value approach, ²⁶ the initial step in which is calculation of the "lodestar" figure, derived by multiplying the number of hours reasonably expended by the hourly rate prevailing in the community for similar work. ²⁷ Repeating a long-familiar formula, we said that the prevailing community rate is the product of a host of factors, including the level of skill necessary, time constraints imposed on the attorney by the litigation, the attorney's reputation, and undesirability of the case. ²⁸ We suggested that a court might, in determining the reasonableness of the hours reported, disallow time spent in duplicative, unorganized or otherwise unproductive effort. ²⁹ We also stated that the court might adjust the lodestar figure to reflect the risk attendant upon arrangements making compensation contingent on success in the case, value lost through delay in receipt of payment, ³⁰ and the quality of representation furnished on behalf of the moving party. ³¹

More recently, in National Association of Concerned Veterans v. Secretary of Defense, ³² we concentrated on the nature of the documentation required of fee claimants. ³³ We declared that the court may, as a means of enforcing the applicable standards, deny a fee motion when the submission is "manifestly inadequate." ³⁴ We expressed the hope that, in suitable circumstances, disallowance of attorneys' fees would serve as a "means of encouraging counsel to maintain adequate records and submit reasonable, carefully calculated and conscientiously measured claims." ³⁵

Total denial of requested fees as a purely prophylactic measure, however, is a stringent sanction, to be reserved for only the most severe of situations, and appropriately invoked only in very limited circumstances. Outright denial may be justified when the party seeking fees declines to proffer any substantiation in the form of affidavits, timesheets or the like, ³⁶ or when the application is grossly and intolerably exaggerated, ³⁷ or manifestly filed in bad faith. ³⁸

Quite obviously, however, the fee application and supporting documentation in the case at bar are not of this nature, and cannot be characterized as "manifestly inadequate." ³⁹ To buttress the motion, appellant presented the affidavit of Victor H. Kramer, appellant's lead counsel in the litigation on the merits, attesting to the number of attorney and student hours expended on each phase. ⁴⁰ Mr. Kramer testified in his deposition that, in arriving at the figures, he first examined the time sheets prepared by the staff attorneys and students recording the dates and hours worked, but not the specific tasks discharged. ⁴¹ He then compared those sheets with a formal case file, and in this manner reconstructed the type of work performed during the hours listed. ⁴² Through this process of reconstruction, Mr. Kramer established, for instance, that he had personally expended four and one-quarter hours on appellant's successful motion for partial summary judgment, while a staff attorney had given forty hours thereto. ⁴³ Similar breakdowns and reconstructions were furnished for work associated with preparation and filing of the initial complaint, drafting of interrogatories and formulation of appellant's opposition to the Department's motion, ⁴⁴ as well as with preliminary appellate motions and appellate briefs. ⁴⁵ The contemporaneous timesheets utilized during this reconstruction were requested by and produced for the Department. ⁴⁶

In addition, Mr. Kramer explained that, when appropriate, he had made downward adjustments in amounts of time claimed. ⁴⁷ For instance, time consumed in teaching students, as well as time expended by new attorneys and students to familiarize themselves with the pending litigation, was not included in the fee claim. ⁴⁸ Hours appraised by Mr. Kramer as either duplicative or excessive were similarly excluded. ⁴⁹

Manifestly, this documentation, though perhaps less detailed than some received by the courts, ⁵⁰ is not so impoverished as to warrant outright denial of any and all fees. Quite to the contrary, the submissions in support of appellant's time claims easily satisfy the standards we enunciated in Copeland ⁵¹ and National Association. ⁵² Though in both cases we emphasized that fee claimants must supply detailed documentation of hours logged and tasks performed, ⁵³ we took care to state that "it is not necessary to know the exact number of minutes spent nor the precise activity to which each hour was devoted." ⁵⁴ To enable opposing counsel adequately to assess the merits of the motion, and the court to fulfill its obligations, no more is necessary than "fairly definite information as to the hours devoted to various general activities, e.g., pretrial discovery, settlement negotiation, and the hours spent by various classes of attorneys, e.g., senior partners, junior partners, (and) associates...." ⁵⁵ This standard, we hold, was here met. ⁵⁶

Complete disallowance of the fees appellant sought could not be justified by the claimed hourly rate of $125 for Mr. Kramer's services. The affidavit of Stuart J. Land, offered in support of the fee claim, asserted that the rate was actually below that prevailing in the local legal community. ⁵⁷ Mr. Land specifically noted that his assessment of the market rate was...