A District Court judge in Arizona has essentially halved the award for attorney’s fees and costs in a Fair Credit Reporting Act lawsuit, but that still amounted to an award of nearly $250,000, which was $100,000 more than the defendants were attempting to pay. The judge called out the plaintiff’s attorneys for filing time records that were “so implausible that it renders the billing records, in their entirety, unreliable.”
A copy of the ruling in the case of Gross v. CitiMortgage can be accessed by clicking here.
The defendant was accused of failing to reasonably investigate a dispute filed by the consumer regarding how his mortgages were being reported on his credit report. While a District Court judge granted summary judgment in favor of the defendant, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned the ruling, saying the defendant was “patently incorrect” for reporting the debt as it did.
The case was remanded back to the District Court level, at which point the defendant made an offer of judgment to the plaintiff in the amount of $50,000, which the plaintiff accepted. All that was left was the attorney’s fees, which neither side could come to an agreement on. That left it up to Judge Roslyn O. Silver of the District Court for the District of Arizona to determine.
The plaintiff’s attorneys submitted a motion seeking $481,807.50, while the defendant countered with $150,333.20. Ultimately, Judge Silver awarded the plaintiff’s attorneys $247,951.
In combing through the billing records submitted by the plaintiff’s attorneys, Judge Silver said she agreed with the defendant that “many of Plaintiff’s entries are excessive, vaguely worded, or otherwise poorly itemized.” Judge Silver pointed to numerous issues in the plaintiff’s submission, such as an entry saying counsel spent nearly three hours to draft/review/submit a statement of discovery dispute that was nine lines of text.
The examples “show there are two possibilities: either the billing records are false, or counsel is not competent to perform tasks at a pace that any court would deem to be reasonable,” Judge Silver wrote. “Regardless of which possibility is accurate, the Court will make significant and required reductions to the requested time.”
