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Lots of Fees for Motions, but Not a Single Phone Call
Any lawyer will tell you that orders like this one described at E-discovery law blog are hard to come by. Essentially, a plaintiffs attorney was awarded over $77,000 in legal fees for work performed over a two-year period in connection with 11 motions to compel various electronic police records. Even more amazing (and for reasons that I don't quite understand), the court ordered defendants to pay the fees dating back to the date of the initial request, even though, apparently, the plaintiffs attorney had only requested hard-copy documents at that time.
The court's order is interesting for two other reasons. First, it includes the plaintiffs attorney's two- to three-page time sheet for the period for which the court granted her fees. There's no one huge item like a 20-hour billable day -- just an endless list of tasks ranging from .1 to 3.0 hours. Amazing how it can add up. Second, throughout the entire time sheet, I did not once see an item such as "call to defense counsel to discuss discovery" or "meet and confer." Though the defendants' attorneys here seemed pretty flaky to let this motion go on for so long, at the same time, I can't help but wonder whether a call or two from the plaintiffs lawyer might have avoided this endless dispute.
What do you think?
Posted by Carolyn Elefant on July 19, 2006 at 06:42 PM | Permalink
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