Judge: Gregory Keosian, Case: BC715568, Date: 2022-10-03 Tentative Ruling
Case Number: BC715568 Hearing Date: October 3, 2022 Dept: 61
Plaintiff Richard Galvan’s Motion
for Attorney Fees and Costs is GRANTED in part. Plaintiff is awarded $61,540.00
in fees, and $7,733.54 in costs and expenses. .
I.
OBJECTIONS
Defendant objects to several
portions of the declaration of Payam Shahian submitted in support of the
motion. These objections are OVERRULED.
Plaintiff objects to various portions of the declaration of
Mikaela M. Jackson, wherein Jackson identifies particular charges claimed by
Plaintiff’s counsel and argues that they are excessive, and further
characterizes the work of Plaintiff’s counsel as bearing similarities to other,
similar lemon law cases. These objections are OVERRULED.
II.
MOTION FOR ATTORNEY FEES
Parties to litigation must generally bear their own attorney’s fees,
unless they otherwise agree. (Code Civ. Proc. § 1021.) However, the
Song-Beverly Act provides for the award of attorneys’ fees to prevailing
plaintiffs as follows:
If the buyer prevails in an action under
this section, the buyer shall be allowed by the court to recover as part of the
judgment a sum equal to the aggregate amount of costs and expenses, including
attorney's fees based on actual time expended, determined by the court to have
been reasonably incurred by the buyer in connection with the commencement and
prosecution of such action.
(Civ. Code § 1794, subd. (d).)
“It is well established that the determination of what constitutes
reasonable attorney fees is committed to the discretion of the trial court,
whose decision cannot be reversed in the absence of an abuse of
discretion.” (Melnyk v. Robledo (1976) 64 Cal.App.3d 618, 623.) In exercising its discretion, the court
should consider a number of factors, including the nature of the litigation,
its difficulty, the amount involved, the skill required in handling the matter,
the attention given, the success or failure, and the resulting judgment. (See id.)
In determining the proper amount of fees to award, courts use the
lodestar method. The lodestar figure is
calculated by multiplying the total number of reasonable hours expended by the
reasonable hourly rate. “Fundamental to
its determination . . . [is] a careful compilation of the time spent and
reasonable hourly compensation of each attorney . . . in the presentation of
the case.” (Serrano v. Priest (1977) 20 Cal.3d 25, 48 (Serrano III).) A reasonable
hourly rate must reflect the skill and experience of the attorney. (Id.
at p. 49.) “Prevailing parties are compensated for hours reasonably spent on
fee-related issues. A fee request that
appears unreasonably inflated is a special circumstance permitting the trial
court to reduce the award or deny one altogether.” (Serrano
v. Unruh (1982) 32 Cal.3d 621, 635 (Serrano
IV).) The Court in Serrano IV also stated that fees
associated with preparing the motion to recover attorneys’ fees are
recoverable. (See id. at p. 624.)
Plaintiff here seeks a total award of fees and expenses
amounting to $102,893.14. Of this amount, $67,896.00 is the attorney fee
lodestar for work performed by Plaintiff’s firm, Strategic Legal Practices, APC
(SLP); $23,763.60 comes from a 1.35 multiplier enhancement; $7,733.54 is for
costs and expenses; and $3,500.00 is for reply to Defendant’s anticipated
opposition to this motion. (Motion at p. i.) SLP seeks fees for 165.5 hours
worked, and presents records of hours worked and the charges made therefore.
(Shahian Decl. Exh. 31.) This matter settled on March 8, 2021, when Plaintiff
executed Defendant’s section 998 offer for $60,000.00.
Defendant in opposition argues that Plaintiff’s attorneys
overcharged for fees in various ways, such as by excessive hourly rates, which
range from $295 to $595 per hour for SLP attorneys and $450 to $650 for CCA.
(Opposition at pp. 5–7.) Defendant also points to the number of attorneys
employed on this matter — eleven lawyers and one clerk — who it claims
performed duplicative and redundant work. (Opposition at pp. 4–5.) Defendant
argues that items billed reflect an “value” of the task performed, rather than
the actual amount of time spent performing them, given Plaintiff’s use for
templates and forms from prior cases. (Motion at pp. 8–9.) And because
Plaintiff’s complaints included both compensable Song-Beverly claims and
non-compensable fraud claims, for which no fees may be awarded, Defendant
argues that the fees sought in relation to fraud matters should be deducted
from any award. (Motion at pp. 10–11.)
There is no cause to reduce the hourly fees sought in this
case. The range of rates charged in this matter by both SLP and CCA is
reasonable for attorneys of similar experience, in the same area, dealing with
the same subject matter. (See Goglin v. BMW of North America, LLC (2016) 4 Cal.App.5th 462, 473–74
[approving $625 per hour fee on lemon law action].) This conclusion is further
corroborated by Plaintiff’s evidence of multiple other cases in which similar
fee awards have been approved. (Shahian Decl. ¶¶ 7–36.) Thus Plaintiff has
provided support for the hourly rates charged here.
Defendant is correct that unreasonable multiplicity of attorneys
performing duplicative work may furnish a basis to substantially reduce a cost
award. In Morris v. Hyundai Motors America (2019) 41 Cal.App.5th
24, the trial court substantially reduced a requested attorney fees award
involving 11 attorneys and two firms in a lemon law action. (Id. at p.
32.) “Out of a total of 283.3 hours of billed work, the court did not award any
fees for 83.5 hours of work billed by six associates.” (Ibid.) The
appellate court affirmed: “Plainly, it is appropriate for a trial court to
reduce a fee award based on its reasonable determination that a routine,
non-complex case was overstaffed to a degree that significant inefficiencies and
inflated fees resulted.” (Id. at p. 39.) The appellate court determined
that the trial court’s remedy of cutting out several attorneys’ billings was
permissible because it “was designed to yield a revised lodestar figure that
reflected a total amount of fees that were reasonably incurred.” (Id. at
p. 40.) A similar result was reached in the case Mikhaeilpoor v. BMW of
North America, LLC (2020) 48 Cal.App.5th 240, 253, which cited Morris
with approval to reduce an award involving 595 claimed hours of work and a
total request of $344,639.00 in fees following trial.
But the reasoning of those cases does not necessarily apply here. A
large number of attorneys is not on its own reason to reduce a fee award, and
both cases cited above upheld lodestar reductions based on the “duplicative”
and “inefficient” billings that resulted from the number of attorneys employed.
(Mikhaeilpoor, supra, 48 Cal.App.5th at p. 255; Morris,
supra, 41 Cal.App.5th at p. 40.) Here the number of attorneys
employed does not indicate a systemic inefficiency of litigation in this
matter; it rather appears from the billing records produced that different
attorneys were employed to address different aspects of the case, such as
drafting the complaint, preparing discovery, responding to a demurrer, and
preparing motions to compel. (Shahian Decl. Exh. 31.)
Not all of these charges are reasonable, however. The billings presented
by Plaintiff include 8.2 hours and $4,305.00 to prepare a motion to
compel in March 2019, when no motion was ever filed. The charges also list 4.2
hours and $1,575.00 at $375 per hour to draft Plaintiff’s discovery requests in
August 2019, and another 3.8 hours and $1,463.00 hours at $385 per hour to
draft discovery responses in the same month. The templates available to
Plaintiff’s counsel from similar tasks in similar cases warrant a reduction to
two hours for each task, yielding reductions of $825 and $693.
Another charge, dated January 6, 2020, shows $533 for 1.3 hours of work
updating the repair chronology, when there are two separate, prior charges for
drafting the very same document. (Shahian Decl. Exh. 31.) These amounts are
appropriately reduced.
No lodestar
multiplier, upward or downward, is appropriate in this matter. “Once the court
has fixed the lodestar, it may increase or decrease that amount by applying a
positive or negative ‘multiplier’ to take into account a variety of other
factors, including the quality of the representation, the novelty and
complexity of the issues, the results obtained, and the contingent risk
presented.” (Thayer v. Wells Fargo Bank.,
N.A. (2001) 92 Cal.App.4th 819, 833.) Although Plaintiffs’ attorneys have
obtained favorable results for their client on an expectation only of
contingency, the subject matter of this case was not so complex as to warrant
recovery of fees beyond the reasonable hourly rates charged.
Accordingly, Plaintiff’s motion for attorney fees, costs,
and expenses is GRANTED in part. Plaintiff is awarded $61,540.00 in fees, and
$7,733.54 in costs and expenses.