Magistrate Judge Mark Clarke orders RISE Law Group to pay $142,560 in attorney fees.
The decision came in his Findings and Recommendation in a case against RISE Law Group, Jamie Hazlett, and Maryanne Pitcher. It was an employment case.
The award to the plaintiff was $10,000. RISE was also ordered to pay the prevailing party's reasonable attorney fees. Those were calculated at $142,560.
Magistrate Judge Mark Clarke signed the order on the next-to-last day of the eight-day trial I attended last month. I wrote about it on March 8. Attorney fees charged by RISE Law Group were a major subject of that trial. That plaintiff in that case claimed the RISE fees were excessive and unreasonable.
What happens in local courts is part of the bigger national controversy about the legitimacy of our entire court system. If people have a bad experience with local courts, while also hearing accusations of biased and unfair courts in the national news, Americans' overall trust in the rule of law is diminished. I learned that a local law firm, RISE Law Group, was causing problems for local courts. Jackson County Court Trial Administrator Tina Qualls wrote me saying:
". . .the RISE Law Group has negatively impacted the court’s ability to schedule family law cases. RISE Law Group has filed frequent motions to “affidavit” judges – i.e. objections to specific judges presiding over their cases. This complicates the judges’ dockets, slows scheduling, and results in processing delays - not only RISE Law Group cases but also for other litigants."
I attended that trial to see for myself. Witnesses called by both the defendant and plaintiff said that RISE was unusual in the aggressiveness of their litigation. The plaintiff's lawyers argued that RISE drove up costs unreasonably. RISE argued that their litigation practice was reasonable and productive. A RISE partner herself said in her closing argument that "we have a reputation for aggressive advocacy for our clients and that we expect to be paid." She said they get their clients better than down-the-middle results. An attorney practicing opposite them testified that when RISE was the opposing counsel, he presumed a more contentious divorce case, and therefore sought a higher retainer fee from his own client.
Longer, more contentious resolutions to cases are a second, confounding problem crowding the domestic relations docket in Jackson County.
My post of March 8 posited that the remedy, if any, for local courts would be stronger cases than the one I witnessed. I thought it at least arguable that the RISE fee of $50,000-plus in that divorce case was necessary, even if on first glance it seemed startlingly high, given the financial circumstances of their client.
There is a second mechanism for dissuading a law firm from crowding court dockets. Aggressive litigation might cause RISE or their clients to pay both their own and the other side's attorney fees. That was the basis for Judge Clarke's findings.
Judge Clarke wrote "Prevailing party attorney fees and costs are mandatory. . . .Congress intended that the wronged employee should receive his full wages plus the penalty without incurring any expense for legal fees or costs." He noted the Ninth Circuit's "lodestar" criteria for determining what is reasonable. These include the time involved for opposing counsel, the standard attorney fees in the area, the novelty of the case, plus any special circumstances.
On pages 11 and 12 of Clarke's order he described special circumstances:
Finally, the Court notes the ferocity with which the Defendants have litigated this case. The Defendants removed this case to federal court on September 15, 2022, and filed an Answer on October 5, 2022. Defendants then proceeded to notice a deposition to Plaintiff immediately, despite opposing counsel alerting them that no depositions could take place prior to completing a Rule 26(f) conference. Defendants, being the party who removed the case, should have been aware of this rule in federal court, yet they persisted in sending notices of deposition for even earlier dates, until Plaintiff was forced to file a motion for a protective order on October 19 2022 (ECF #8). Similarly, later in the case, Defendants noticed depositions for ten different witnesses in this matter, and they objected to streamlining of discovery, (see ECF Order #30). Plaintiff asserts that several of the depositions noticed by the Defendants were cancelled at the last minute, requiring Plaintiff's attorneys to expend a significant amount of effort to prepare for nothing.
Magistrate Judge Clarke concluded with:
While the Defendants were well within their rights to litigate this case as zealously as they deemed appropriate, they cannot now complain about the hours billed in response to this tactic.
I was struck by the word "ferocity."
In the case of Mrs. O against RISE, the partners said they get good results and have happy clients. That zealousness comes with a risk. Possibly the opposing party will ultimately pay the cost for that zealousness through a better award. Maybe not. Testimony by Mrs. O in her case was that RISE told her that her soon-to-be-former husband would end up paying the cost of litigation. It turned out to be more complicated than that.
After my March 8 post, I received criticism saying I was too easy on RISE. Critics said that, in effect, I did an advertisement for RISE. I had quoted a RISE partner saying they were called a "bulldog" and a "man-eater" by competing lawyers, but that their aggressiveness gave good value. Sometimes it probably does. I thought they presented a strong argument in the case I observed. But sometimes apparently not. Multiple former clients have filed complaints about their fees.
Driving up the costs of settling disputes has a risk. That is something for litigants to consider, including ones who considered my March 8 post an advertisement for RISE. You need to pay your attorney. The fee may surprise you. Sometimes you may need to pay your opponent's attorney. In this case RISE was both the client and the attorney, and they were ordered to pay $142,560. They were ferocious.
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NOTE: The courts are the public's business. If divorce cases are slow to be resolved in a community, for whatever reasons, it is public business. I'm writing here as an opinion journalist, one with a small audience, something over 2,000 a day, 365 days a year.
These are my opinions; no one else’s. I am writing based on the judge's document and observations I made watching and reviewing audio recordings of testimony and closing arguments made in open court. My wife is an attorney. She is the executive director of the Center for Nonprofit Legal Services. Neither she nor CNPLS has anything to do with my blog. She rarely reads it.
I welcome comments from parties to any of the disputes I am describing, or from people with professional knowledge of the local courts. I would expect to publish them verbatim.
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