Murray v. Weinberger
| Decision Date | 24 August 1984 |
| Citation | 741 F.2d 1423,239 U.S.App.D.C. 264 |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — District of Columbia Circuit |
Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Columbia (Civil Action No. 75-02145).
Charles Francis Flynn, Asst. U.S. Atty., Washington, D.C., with whom Joseph E. diGenova, U.S. Atty., Royce C. Lamberth and R. Craig Lawrence, Asst. U.S. Attys., Washington, D.C., were on the brief, for appellant.
Wiley A. Branton, with whom Roma J. Stewart, Washington, D.C., was on the brief, for appellee.
Before WILKEY and WALD, Circuit Judges, and McGOWAN, Senior Circuit Judge.
Opinion for the Court filed by Circuit Judge WILKEY.
This is an appeal from an order of the district court awarding attorney's fees to a prevailing plaintiff in a Title VII suit which was brought against the U.S. Secretary of Defense. The appellant contends that the district court abused its discretion by increasing the lodestar figures for the plaintiff's attorneys by 50 to 80 percent for the factors of quality of representation, risk of nonpayment, and delay in payment for the services rendered. We reverse in part, vacate in part, and remand the case to the district court for proceedings consistent with this opinion.
In 1975 the plaintiff Idella Murray sued the Secretary of Defense alleging unlawful employment discrimination on the basis of race and sex in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 1 She charged that the defendant unlawfully refused to promote her from the GS-13 level that she had occupied since 1970, and she sought promotion to GS-14 retroactively to 1972 and to GS-15 retroactively to 1974. The case was tried in September of 1979. In 1981 the district court entered judgment in favor of the plaintiff and ordered the defendant to promote the plaintiff to GS-14 retroactively to 1973 and to pay her the back pay she would have received if she had been so promoted at that time. 2
Shortly thereafter, the plaintiff filed a motion for attorney's fees and costs. As amended, the motion for attorney's fees sought $66,287.96 for the chief trial counsel, Roma Stewart; $17,609.00 for attorney Prather Randle, who participated in the first few days of the trial; and $5,791.50 for the post-trial legal work of attorney Ronda Billig. 3 The fee applications proposed awards based on hourly rates for services rendered multiplied by specific multipliers for certain factors. Attorney Stewart sought a multiplier of 1.8 times the basic hourly rate due to the risk of nonpayment of her legal fees and for the delay in payment of fees. Attorney Billig sought a multiplier of 1.5 both for the contingency of payment and for the delay in payment, and attorney Randle sought a multiplier of 1.5 for the contingent nature of payment. Although the defendant disputed a few of the hours and costs claimed by plaintiff's counsel, he principally objected to the hourly rates and multipliers sought by the plaintiff's three attorneys.
In February of 1982 the district court issued an order awarding attorney's fees and costs to the plaintiff to the extent that they were not disputed by either party. 4 Subsequently the defendant asked the district court to require the plaintiff to resubmit the attorney's fees applications to conform with a recently issued decision of this court, which requires an applicant to document the market rates of attorneys in the relevant community. 5 The plaintiff opposed that motion and supplemented her amended motion for attorney's fees by requesting an additional $2,205.63 for counsel's work in connection with the request for attorney's fees. 6
On 15 April 1983 the district court denied the defendant's motion and held that additional information about the market value of the plaintiff's attorneys was not necessary in this case. 7 In its order, the district court also made a final award for plaintiff's attorney's fees and costs, which totaled $63,159.43, from which amount he deducted the fees previously awarded to the plaintiff by the court's earlier order. 8
In its final attorney's fees order, the district court calculated a lodestar figure for each attorney by multiplying the prevailing hourly rate for the year in which the services were rendered times the number of hours reasonably expended. The court established the hourly rate for each of plaintiff's attorneys by reference to the prevailing community rates for Title VII litigators of similar experience at that time; the hourly rates were from $55 per hour in 1975 to $100 per hour in 1982. 9 Next the court determined the reasonable number of hours expended by the plaintiff's attorneys by subtracting the number of hours that did not contribute to the resolution of the case or that were unreasonably spent on the preparation of the fee affidavit and petition from the raw total of hours claimed. 10
The district court then adjusted these lodestar figures to reflect three factors: (1) the quality of representation; (2) the contingency of payment due to the risk of losing on the merits; and (3) delay in payment. The court held that attorneys Billig and Randle each were entitled to a 1.5 multiplier of their lodestar figures to compensate them for contingency and delay and it granted attorney Stewart a multiplier of 1.8 to compensate her for the above average quality of her representation. 11
The attorney's fees provision of Title VII permits the district court, in its discretion, to award attorney's fees and costs to a prevailing party. The statute provides:
In any action or proceeding under ... [Title VII] the court, in its discretion, may allow the prevailing party, other than the [Equal Employment Opportunity] Commission or the United States, a reasonable attorney's fee as part of the costs, and the Commission and the United States shall be liable for costs the same as a private person. 12
In Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises, 390 U.S. 400, 88 S.Ct. 964, 19 L.Ed.2d 1263, the Supreme Court found that the purpose of awarding attorney's fees from the losing party in civil rights litigation is "to encourage individuals injured by ... discrimination to seek judicial relief" by enabling them to obtain adequate counsel for their meritorious claims. 13 The congressional intent to aid injured individuals by permitting the court to award attorney's fees to the prevailing party in civil rights cases is made clear by the legislative history of the Civil Rights Attorney's Fees Awards Act of 1976, which is analogous to the statute applicable in the instant case. 14 The policy of fee-shifting was identified as follows:
It is intended that the amount of fees awarded under ... [this act] be governed by the same standards which prevail in other types of equally complex Federal litigation .... [Application of the] appropriate standards ... have resulted in fees which are adequate to attract competent counsel, but which do not produce windfalls to attorneys. 15
Likewise the Supreme Court stated in Hensley v. Eckerhart that the policy of statutory provisions awarding fees to prevailing parties "is to ensure 'effective access to the judicial process' for persons with civil rights grievances." 16 Our analysis of the attorney's fees statute in Title VII, therefore, must be guided by the principle that the purpose of the statute is to benefit meritorious claimants--not to subsidize the legal profession.
The starting point in fee-setting under the statute is the computation of the lodestar figure for each fee applicant. In Copeland v. Marshall we held that any fee-setting inquiry must begin with the lodestar figure, which is the number of hours reasonably expended multiplied by a reasonable hourly rate. 17 The reasonable rate is determined by reference to the prevailing market rate in the relevant community according to the Supreme Court's recent decision in Blum v. Stenson. 18 The number of hours reasonably expended on behalf of the prevailing party is determined by evaluating the total number of hours expended and disallowing unproductive time or time spent on unsuccessful claims; hours that are "excessive, redundant, or otherwise unnecessary" must be excluded from the lodestar calculation. 19
In the instant case, it appears that the district court determined the reasonable rate according to the market rate prevailing in the relevant community, 20 and properly reduced the total number of hours billed by the number of redundant and unproductive hours expended by counsel. The reasonable hours billed times the market rate produced lodestar figures for each of the three attorneys which were not challenged by the appellant. 21
The lodestar figure of reasonable hours times a reasonable market rate is presumptively a reasonable attorney's fee under the statute. In Hensley v. Eckerhart the Supreme Court stated that the lodestar figure should produce "a fully compensatory fee" in any case in which a plaintiff has obtained "excellent results." 22 The recent case of Blum v. Stenson reiterates the principle that the product of reasonable hours times a reasonable hourly rate normally provides a reasonable attorney's fee within the meaning of the statute. In Blum, the Supreme Court admonished that only in "exceptional" circumstances will the lodestar figure produce an unreasonably low fee within the meaning of the statute. 23 Disallowing a 50 percent increase in the lodestar figure in that case, the Court stated that it is a "rare case in which an upward adjustment to the presumptively reasonable fee of rate times hours is appropriate." 24
The principle that only rare and exceptional circumstances can justify an upward adjustment of the lodestar places a heavy burden on a fee applicant to...
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