Seldom Seen: Awarding Attorney's Fees Under ERISA to a Prevailing Defendant
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This is something you don’t see every day, namely an award of significant attorney’s fees to the prevailing defendant in an ERISA governed action. In R.I. Carpenters Annuity Fund v. Trevi Icos Corp., just decided by the United States District Court for the District of Rhode Island (but not yet up on its website), the court entered such an award against the losing plaintiff, a union provided employee benefit plan, on a claim brought by it under ERISA, even though the court acknowledged that ERISA’s fee shifting provisions are seldom used to require a losing plaintiff to pay attorney’s fees to a prevailing defendant. Here, however, the plaintiff had used ERISA as an alternative mechanism for litigating a jurisdictional dispute with another union over a project, apparently for tactical reasons related to adverse rulings against it before the National Labor Relations Board in other, similar circumstances. The court provides a nice review of the factors in the First Circuit that govern the decision whether to award attorney’s fees to a prevailing party, and noted that the key issue in the case before it was whether the plaintiff’s decision to use ERISA as a tactical tool for litigation strategy constituted a misuse of the statute, warranting an award of attorney’s fees in favor of the prevailing defendant. The court explained:
The Court should consider five factors in deciding whether to award fees and costs to a party: (1) the degree of culpability or bad faith attributable to the losing party; (2) the depth of the losing party's pocket, i.e., his or her capacity to pay an award; (3) the extent (if at all) to which such an award would deter other persons acting under similar circumstances; (4) the benefit (if any) that the successful suit confers on plan participants or beneficiaries generally; and (5) the relative merit of the parties' positions. Cottrill v. Sparrow, Johnson & Ursillo, Inc., 100 F.3d 220, 225 (1st Cir. 1996); see also Beauvais v. Citizens Fin. Group, Inc., 418 F. Supp. 2d 22, 33 (D.R.I. 2006). These so-called Cottrill factors are guidelines and do not preclude the Court from consideration of other factors. Cook, 334 F.3d at 124. Rather, the Court may - and should - consider "additional criteria that seem apropos." Cottrill, 100 F.3d at 225. Ultimately, the test for granting or denying attorney's fees and costs in an ERISA case is, in a word, "flexible." Id.; see also Gray v. New England Tel. & Tel. Co., 792 F.2d 251, 258 (1st Cir. 1986).ERISA's broad language permits the Court to award fees and costs to "either" party. However, the substantive purpose of ERISA is remedial, i.e., it is designed to protect "the interests of participants in employee benefit plans and their beneficiaries." 29 U.S.C. § 1001(b). Consequently, some courts have noted that fees or costs seldom should be assessed against unsuccessful ERISA plaintiffs. See, e.g., Operating Eng'rs Pension Trust v. Gilliam, 737 F.2d 1501, 1505-06 (9th Cir. 1984); Marquardt v. N. Am. Car Corp., 652 F.2d 715, 719-20 (7th Cir. 1981). Before the Court tackles the individual Cottrill factors it should be noted that this is not a typical ERISA case. As was discussed in the Court's decision denying summary judgment, the driving force behind this action seems to be a jurisdictional dispute between two labor unions -- the Carpenters Union Local 94 and the Laborers Union, both of which claimed the right to represent the workers on the "front-end" of the CM-120. R. I. Carpenters Annuity Fund v. Trevi Icos Corp., 474 F. Supp. 2d 326, 331 (D.R.I. 2007). Whether fees should be awarded turns on the question of whether it is appropriate to use ERISA litigation as a vehicle to pursue Local 94's claim of jurisdiction. If it is legitimate to use ERISA in this way, then even an unsuccessful Plaintiff might not be "culpable" under the Cottrill factors. If it is not, then to use ERISA this way (at the expense of an innocent employer) more likely evidences culpability under the Cottrill analysis.
The court then concluded that the plaintiff’s strategic use of ERISA in this manner was not appropriate, and justified an award of attorney’s fees to the defendant.
It is a fascinating decision for at least two reasons. The first is the relative rarity of a court granting attorney’s fees to the prevailing defendant, and the case presents a road map as to one particular line of argument that a defendant can pursue to seek such an award. The second is that the case drives home the need to consider the rationale for including an ERISA claim in a case, and suggests that there are risks to using ERISA in situations where other statutes or theories of liability are better suited to targeting the specific mischief at issue.
The Five Factor Test for Attorney's Fee Awards Under ERISA
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Here’s a nice follow up ruling in the case of Curran v Camden National, a particularly interesting ERISA case that I discussed here. In this newest ruling, the United States District Court for the District of Maine denied the motion of the defendant - which had earlier successfully moved to dismiss the complaint against it - for an award of attorney’s fees under ERISA. The Court first stated the governing standard in the First Circuit on this issue, which is that:
in an ERISA case, a prevailing plaintiff does not, merely by prevailing, create a presumption that he or she is entitled to a fee-shifting award [and there is no] creation of a presumption in favor of prevailing defendants. Rather . . . in the context of ERISA cases, the Court is to apply a five-factor analysis to determine the appropriateness of an award of attorney's fees to the prevailing party: (1) the degree of culpability or bad faith attributable to the losing party; (2) the depth of the losing party's pocket, i.e., his or her capacity to pay an award; (3) the extent (if at all) to which such an award would deter other persons acting under similar circumstances; (4) the benefit (if any) that the successful suit confers on plan participants or beneficiaries generally; and (5) the relative merit of the parties' positions.
The Court then went step by step through each factor, explaining how none warranted an award of attorney’s fees, despite the fact that the defendant had prevailed on a motion to dismiss - which is always a pretty good showing of a potentially severe absence of merit in the plaintiff’s claims. The Court explained that prevailing on such a motion alone cannot be enough to support an award of attorney’s fees, because if it was, it would discourage parties from proceeding with what may well be meritorious claims out of fear of being hit with an award of attorney’s fees if they are wrong in their analysis of the merits. The take home from the opinion in this case can only be that the standard for obtaining such an award, at least as a prevailing defendant, is pretty high, and if I were defending against a claim for attorney’s fees under ERISA, this is the case I would open my brief with.
Attorney Fee Awards in Insurance Coverage Litigation
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When I was first starting out as a lawyer, stuck with research assignments that required figuring out all aspects of a particular state's law on a particular issue, I always liked to begin by looking for a federal district court decision on the subject, because the federal court decisions had a tendency to include a comprehensive summary of all the law in the state in question on the issue in dispute. This saved the work of reviewing multiple state court decisions, each of which tended to address only one narrow part of the overall issue without discussing other state court decisions that addressed other aspects of the issue. I have always attributed this, by the way, to the federal courts' greater access to law clerks, who could be counted on to turn opinions into minor treatises.
Anyway, here is a perfect example of this phenomenon, only here on an issue that matters to this blog: namely, when can an insured obtain recovery of attorneys fees under Massachusetts law from an insurer in a lawsuit over coverage. Massachusetts state court decisions establish that coverage litigation is an exception, at least here, to the American rule, and that in Massachusetts, it is loser pays, at least if the insurer is the loser in the case.
But the Massachusetts state court decisions to this effect are spread across several cases and could arguably be limited to their facts, unless you synthesize them and push their reasoning one step further. The federal district court in Massachusetts has taken this last step for us, reviewing the Massachusetts state court decisions on this issue and concluding that they add up to an insured being entitled to recover the attorneys fees it incurs in establishing either a duty to defend or a duty to indemnify on the part of the insurer, without limitation to whether the policy in question provides first party or instead third party coverage.
Attorney Fee Awards in the First Circuit
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There was another important issue addressed in the First Circuit's decision this month in Janeiro, one I had planned to address in a return post on the case, involving an issue dear to the hearts of anyone who sues plans, administrators or fiduciaries for a living, namely the right to recover attorneys' fees in such a lawsuit. Before I could return to this point, however, I got sidetracked by my favorite decision of the month, Abatie v. Alta Health and Life Insurance. So I am returning to it now, before this point can get shunted to the side again by some other new development.
In Janeiro, you may recall, the defendant took a beating in the case, and the plaintiff, rightfully so under ERISA, sought to recover attorneys' fees after prevailing on his claim. The First Circuit, addressing the district court's decision not to award fees to the prevailing plaintiff, gave a nice, concise presentation of the law at this point in time in this circuit on this issue. Emphasizing that an award of attorneys' fees in such cases is entirely discretionary, the court discussed the standards governing this determination in this circuit. In key part, the court declared:
ERISA provides that attorneys' fees are available in the court's discretion. . . . We begin by noting that in an ERISA case, a prevailing plaintiff does not, merely by prevailing, create a presumption that he or she is entitled to a fee-shifting award.. . . [T]his court has listed five factors that ordinarily should guide the district court's analysis: (1) the degree of culpability or bad faith attributable to the losing party; (2) the depth of the losing party's pocket, i.e., his or her capacity to pay an award; (3) the extent (if at all) to which such an award would deter other persons acting under similar circumstances; (4) the benefit (if any) that the successful suit confers on plan participants or beneficiaries generally; and (5) the relative merit of the parties' positions. . . .This list is illustrative, not exhaustive[;]no single factor is dispositive; and indeed, not every factor in the list must be considered in every case.
The First Circuit approved of the district court's analysis of this issue, and in so doing presented the model for how to address this issue. It is fact specific, and the way to argue it to the court, and for the court to in turn consider the issue, is to address what the actual facts of the matter show on that specific case with regard to each of the five factors (recognizing, of course, that the First Circuit specifically left open the possibility that there are still more factors that could possibly be considered, and that even some of the factors specifically identified by the court may have no relevance).
How Do You Calculate a Fee Award to a Solo Practitioner?
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There is a neat little ERISA decision just out from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. In the case of James McDonald et al. v. Pension Plan of the NYSA-ILA Pension Trust Fund, et al., http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/ decided on Tuesday, the court addressed the question of determining an appropriate fee award under ERISA for a prevailing plaintiff who was represented by a solo practitioner. Noting that the general rule is that "[i]n calculating attorney's fee awards, district courts use the loadstar method - hours reasonably expended multiplied by a reasonable hourly rate," the court launched into an interesting discussion of how to determine for these purposes the reasonable hourly rate for a solo practitioner. The court rejected the idea that the rate should automatically be lower based on the status of the attorney as a solo practitioner or that otherwise the size of the attorney's firm alone is grounds upon which to set the rate; it is, the court noted, a factor that should go into determining the market against which the reasonable fee should be set, but no more than that. Of even more interest, the court rejected the unique act of trying to set the solo attorney's reasonable hourly fee at what would be an acceptable blended rate in the market, because while larger firms use blended rates to even out the cost to the client across the services of more experienced and less experienced attorneys, this did not actually occur in the case before the court, where the plaintiff was represented by a solo practitioner.
Ringing the bell twice
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There is an interesting article concerning the latest developments over the case of Jurinko v. Medical Protective Corp., the largest insurance bad faith verdict in Pennsylvania history, reprinted in Law.com from The Legal Intelligencer, at http://www.law.com/jsp/law/sfb/lawArticleSFB.jsp?id=1144330160389. The article concerns the plaintiffs' lawyers attempt to make new law that would increase the attorney's fee award to them as the prevailing plaintiffs in this insurance bad faith case, a case which is nicely summed up in the court's opinion on post trial motions at http://www.paed.uscourts.gov/documents/opinions/06d0372p.pdf.
The article points out that fee awards are entirely discretionary under Pennsylvania law, and discusses that the plaintiffs' lawyers are trying to convince the court to vary from the usual application in that jurisdiction of the lodestar method of awarding attorney's fees.
Such an award would not be discretionary in Massachusetts, where General Laws Chapter 93A, which is the operative statute for bringing a bad faith action against an insurer, mandates such awards to plaintiffs. This is entirely consistent with Massachusetts law in general at this point, which essentially provides a carve out for insurance disputes, in most circumstances, from the typical pay your own way rule with regard to attorney's fees. Instead, in this state, if the policyholder or the claimant wins a coverage or bad faith dispute, their attorney's fees typically become the problem of the insurer that ended up on the wrong side of the verdict.