After winning one out of nine claims, the plaintiff – a recently fired loan officer – sued to recover about $30K in attorneys’ fees under the Illinois Wage Payment and Collection Act (IWPCA) from his former employer.
Awarding the plaintiff just a fraction (just over $5K) of his claimed fees, the Northern District in Palar v. Blackhawk Bancorporation, 2014 WL 4087436 (N.D.Ill. 2014), provides a gloss on the factors a court considers when assessing attorneys’ fees. The key principles:
– the lodestar method (hours worked times the hourly rate) is the proper framework for analyzing fees in a IWPCA claim;
– a court may increase or decrease a lodestar figure to reflect multiple factors including (i) the complexity of the legal issues involved, (ii) the degree of success obtained, (iii) the public interest advanced by the suit);
– the key inquiry is whether the fees are reasonable in relation to the difficulty, stakes and outcome of the case;
– a court shouldn’t eyeball a fee request and chop it down based on arbitrary decisions though: the court must provide a clear, concise explanation for any fee reduction;
– an attorneys’ reasonable hourly rate should reflect the market rate: the rate lawyers of similar ability and experience charge in a given community;
– “market rate” is presumably the attorney’s actual billing rate for comparable work;
– if the attorney has no bills for comparable work to show the court, the attorney may instead (a) submit supporting affidavits from similarly experienced attorneys attesting to the rates they charge clients for similar work, or (b) submit evidence of fee awards the attorney has received in similar cases;
– once the fee-seeking attorney makes this market rate showing, the burden shifts to the opponent to demonstrate why the Court should lower the rate;
(**4-5).
The Court then set down the governing rules that apply when a plaintiff wins some claims and loses others; and how that impacts the fee award calculus:
– a party may not recover fees for hours spent on unsuccessful claims;
– where the successful and unsuccessful claims involve a common core of facts and are based on related legal theories, time spent on losing claims may be compensable: litigants should be penalized for pursuing multiple and alternative avenues of relief;
– when reducing a fee award based on certain unsuccessful claims, the court should identify specific hours to be eliminated;
– attorneys can recover fees incurred in litigating the fee award those fee petition fees must not be disproportionate to the fees spent on litigating the merits;
– the Court should consider whether hours spent on the fee request bear a rational relationship to the hours spent on the merits of the case;
– the Seventh Circuit recognizes 15 minutes per hour ratio of fee hours vs. merits hours as excessive (so 1 hour on fee issue for 4 hours on merits would be disproportionate).
(*5).
With these guideposts in mind, the Court reduced plaintiff’s claimed fees by deducting (a) fees spent on unsuccessful and unrelated (to the IWPCA count) claims; and (b) fees incurred litigating the fees dispute.
The combined reductions amounted to almost $25K out of the $30K plaintiff claimed in his fee petition. The Court held that a $5K fee award on final compensation of about $1,500 was justified given the IWPCA’s mandatory fee provision and stated policy of deterring employers from refusing to pay separated employees’ wages.
Afterwords:
There is no precise formula governing fee awards. The court will consider the amount claimed versus the fees sought and whether they are congruent with those figures.
This case also illustrates that a court will look at how many claims the plaintiff won and lost in the same case when fashioning a fee award.