Posted on 08/08/2015 11:07:55 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Recent filings in an attorney fee request in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit lift the veil on the four-figure hourly rates charged by top advocates before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Thomas Goldstein of Washington’s Goldstein & Russell, who argued and won five high court cases last term, is seeking nearly $306,000 in fees from Los Angeles after winning City of Los Angeles v. Patel, a key Fourth Amendment case, in June.
Goldstein argued in March on behalf of local motel owners Naranjibhai and Primilaben Patel, who sought protection for their guest registries from police scrutiny without a search warrant. Goldstein made the fee request under the federal law that allows winning parties to recover fees in civil rights litigation against government entities.
The $305,887.50 amount is based in part on Goldstein’s $1,100 hourly fee, plus $750 for partner Kevin Russell and $600 for partner Tejinder Singh (left). Goldstein said in an affidavit that the fee request is based on “reasonable hourly rates.”
Goldstein described his firm as a four-lawyer boutique and said that in the last decade, he has been “counsel of record on more successful petitions for certiorari … than any other lawyer in private practice.”
For the sake of comparison in evaluating his hourly fee, Goldstein, a former partner at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, pointed to rates charged by other veteran Supreme Court advocates: $1,350 per hour for Paul Clement of Bancroft, $1,800 for Theodore Olson of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, and $1,020 per hour for his adversary in the Patel case, E. Joshua Rosenkranz of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe.
Goldstein obtained the rates from public documents filed in other fee requests in recent years. Rosenkranz’s rate is “presumably higher today” because it came from a 2013 fee request he made in a Supreme Court case, Goldstein said.
Goldstein also noted that he represented Patel on what could be described as a contingency basis. “We agreed to represent the plaintiffs pro bono, recovering only prevailing party fees under Section 1988,” he wrote, referring to 42 U.S.C. 1988. He said that “in light of the substantial risk that we would not have been paid for taking on this representation, the rates … are on the low end.”
Goldstein billed only 104 hours, he said in the affidavit, because “we consciously endeavored to minimize the expense generated by our firm by assigning tasks to the most affordable attorney capable of performing them.” He said he also kept costs down by “leveraging heavily the efforts of our student team.”
Seven students from the Harvard Law School Supreme Court Litigation Clinic spent more than 1,200 hours working on the case, Goldstein said. The students, he said, provided “invaluable research and drafting support.”
Harvard, through the Patels' lawyers, seeks nearly $150,000 in fees for the students' work, according to a declaration filed Friday night in the Ninth Circuit. "All fees recovered for the students' work will be remitted to the law school and used to support its clinical programs," Goldstein wrote in the declaration.
Goldstein said that in another Supreme Court case from the Ninth Circuit, a team of nine Jenner & Block lawyers spent more than 2,000 hours “to perform the same tasks that we performed here.” The 2011 case Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association gave First Amendment protection to violent video games. Jenner ultimately won $950,000 in fees.
The Patels’ original Los Angeles lawyer, Frank Weiser, also sought $317,062.50 in fees for his work before and during the Supreme Court case. His hourly rate was $750. Weiser said he also was not compensated by the clients, except for $2,900 in costs.
A message left with a lawyer who represented Los Angeles in the Ninth Circuit was not immediately returned Friday.
This story was updated to include information from a declaration filed Friday night about the fees Harvard Law School is seeking.
Justice aint free.
Most Americans cannot afford the justice that was supposed to be their birthright.
Unlike medicine, the law and its administration is wholly a creation of the government. A citizen should not have to impoverish themselves in order to remediate damages delivered by the hands of government employees. (I'm channeling my inner Sanders). If medical care, and education, and college are rights, then surely dealing with the government in a court of law is a right.
We had a nuisance suit filed against us, had E&O coverage, cost us $1K for deductible. Our attorney billed between $20-30K just representing us in pre trial stuff and getting us dismissed from the suit (one of these ‘sue everyone’ things). One of the reasons we encouraged our son to become an attorney
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