- “Kentucky antidiscrimination law doesn’t bar discrimination based on litigiousness” [Volokh]
- “Lawyer sues to stop fireworks show; now wants $756K in fees from taxpayers” [CJAC, San Diego]
- Leahy bill reauthorizing VAWA (Violence Against Women Act) includes language codifying OCR assault on campus due process [Bader, Daily Caller, Inside Higher Ed, FIRE, earlier here, here]
- “One-Ninth the Freedom Kids Used To Have” [Free-Range Kids] “WARNING: Baby in pram! Anything could happen!” [same]
- New Zealand considers criminalizing breaches of fiduciary duty [Prof. Bainbridge]
- From libertarian Steve Chapman, a favorable rating for Rahm Emanuel as Chicago mayor [Chicago Tribune]
- Did California privacy legislation just regulate bloggers? [Eric Goldman, Paul Alan Levy]
Posts Tagged ‘attorneys’ fees’
New Jersey: will $650 recovery support $99,000 fee-shift?
The New Jersey Supreme Court is being asked to review a case against a car dealer in which the plaintiff’s lawyer obtained a $99,000 fee award; the client’s actual recovery was $650, and the underlying disputed charge was $51.50. In a companion case, a complaint over inadequate handicapped parking won a $2,500 payout for the complainant and $74,000 for her lawyer. The cases could determine whether New Jersey retreats from a relatively liberal formula in which courts enhance many fee awards to prevailing plaintiffs above market rates. [New Jersey Law Journal]
California’s sclerotic CEQA
As Gideon Kanner points out, you don’t need to be a property rights advocate to see the California Environmental Quality Act as a lawsuit-intensive mess (quoting Prof. Robert Freilich):
Many attorneys, planners, architects, engineers, scientists, developers, small businesses, business associations and governments in the state, and many environmentalists are agreed that CEQA needs major reform. Delays in the system are causing projects to suffer delays of 2 to 9 years to get EIRs approved, especially for (but not limited to) the failure to compare the project with all “feasible” alternatives, establish vague baseline analysis for existing mitigation, and the tricky determination as to which parts of regional, general and specific plan EIR findings can be incorporated, to eliminate duplication of effort and cost. The law is so confused on these points that it is a miracle that any EIR can survive its first round in the courts without a remand to do it over again. Complicating this result is the establishment of a specialized group of attorneys that initiate litigation at the drop of a hat, primarily because the statute authorizes attorney’s fees for any remand or reversal. Many community associations and no growth environmentalists use the EIR litigation process to delay and in many cases kill projects for little or no environmental substance.
EPA gives millions to environmental groups that sue it
I’ve got a new post up at Cato at Liberty about the convenient symbiosis between the EPA and advocacy groups it funds that sue it demanding that it regulate new things. “Sweetheart” or otherwise, the resulting legal actions help deploy taxpayers’ money in service of the relentless expansion of the regulatory state. More: Bader.
California Environmental Quality Act at 40
With “one-way” fee entitlements — plaintiffs collect if successful, but do not pay if they lose — it is no wonder that the California Environmental Quality Act [CEQA] attracts tactical and opportunistic litigants, including some whose interest seems to lie more in legal fees than in environmental reform. “Unfortunately, it is not uncommon to see CEQA used by competitors to block new businesses from coming into their market or by unions trying to force businesses to accept labor agreements. Neither represents what CEQA was intended to do, and there should be protections so the law cannot be [hijacked] for such purposes.” [Cynthia Kurtz, Whittier Daily News via Todd Roberson, CJAC]
“Lawyer asks for $10M in desegregation case”
Opelousas, Louisiana: “The attorney who filed the original desegregation lawsuit against the St. Landry Parish School Board in 1965 is seeking nearly $10 million in legal fees for his work on the case over the past 46 years.” [AP/Daily World, Baton Rouge Advocate]
“LawyerClock: How much is this meeting costing me?”
Just for fun — or maybe that’s the wrong word — this website allows you to noodle around to estimate how much money is flying out the window as lawyers quibble at your meeting or phone call.
A tale of California labor law
“Bookworm,” the Bay Area-based blogger, tells the story of what happened in a case on which she worked, which arose after an employer encountered the interaction of two California laws, one requiring that final wages be paid within three days, another tilting attorneys’ fee awards toward employees in disputes with employers. A highlight: when the California Supreme Court attempted to correct some of the most extreme unfairness arising from the fee rules, it got overridden by the state legislature. [Bookworm Room]
“And you thought you billed a lot of hours…”
Ted Frank, who’s challenging the Cobell (Indian trust) class action fees as part of his work with the Center for Class Action Fairness, catches out a lawyer who claims to have worked for more than nine hours a day on the case for 14 years, including a 7-year stretch in which he purportedly worked “an average of eleven hours a day, every day seven days a week without a single day off.” [Above the Law, earlier]
Sidewalks, ADA suits, and attorneys’ fees
According to Todd Roberson at CJAC, a federal court’s ruling in a 14-year dispute over street curbs and sidewalks in Riverside, California has headed off a potential “avalanche of lawsuits.” U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner ruled the complainant in the case “had failed to demonstrate that Riverside as a whole is inaccessible to the disabled.”
Riverside’s City Attorney, Greg Priamos, was quoted in the Daily Journal saying the suit was “about money, not accessibility…The only hangup to a settlement earlier in the case was the amount of attorney’s fees. I’m offended by that.”