In mulling a fee request by plaintiffs counsel who successfully settled a wage-and-hour and discrimination case, a federal judge in Maryland rejected the notion that crafting the fee petition and subsequent reply accounted for more than 19% of the total work done on the matter.
“It is alarming to the court that plaintiffs’ counsel requests 26.9 hours for the filing of its petition and reply,” U.S. Magistrate Judge J. Mark Coulson of the District of Maryland wrote in a Feb. 7 opinion. “If the court were to accept that plaintiffs’ counsel put 26.9 hours of work into the petition and reply, the court would be accepting the notion that a petition for attorneys’ fees can account for 19.4% of the total work put into a case.”
