Aside from its trenchant discussion of the constructive fraud rule in mechanics lien litigation, the Illinois First District in Father & Sons Home Improvement II, Inc. v. Stuart, 2016 IL App (1st) 143666 clarified that a paralegal’s time and services can be added to a claim for attorneys’ fees as a sanction against a losing party who files false pleadings.
In an earlier post, I discussed how the lien claimant in this case lost its lien foreclosure suit for misstating the completion of work date and inflating the monetary value of work and materials it affixed to the subject site. The property owner and a lender defendant filed a fee petition and sanctions motion, respectively.
Examining the lender’s motion for Rule 137 sanctions, the Court stated some black-letter rules that govern fee petitions:
- Under Rule 137, a party can recover attorneys’ fees incurred as a result of a sanctionable pleading or paper (one filed without an objectively reasonable legal basis);
- Typically, “overhead” expenses aren’t compensable in a fee motion. The theory is that overhead costs are already built into an attorneys’ hourly rate;
- Overhead includes telephone charges, in-house delivery charges, photocopying, check processing, and in-house paralegal and secretarial services;
- However, when a paralegal performs a specialized legal task that would normally be performed by an attorney, the paralegal’s fees are recoverable since those services would not be considered overhead.
The Court found that the lender’s paralegals performed myriad services that would normally be done by an attorney – namely, researching the title history of the subject property and preparing a memorandum summarizing the title history. By contrast, a paralegal’s general administrative tasks were disallowed by the court and could not be sought in the sanctions motion.
Afterwords:
When preparing a fee petition, the prevailing party should also include paralegal time and services; especially if they involve researching real estate land records and summarizing a title history. While the line separating legal services (which are recoverable) and administrative or overhead expenses (which aren’t) is blurry, Father & Sons stands for the proposition that a fee petition or Rule 137 sanctions motion can be augmented by paralegal fees where the paralegal performs specialized work that contains an element of legal analysis.
