Justia Legal Ethics Opinion Summaries

After multiple appeals to the court and extensive trial and other proceedings, plaintiffs' Title VII class action for employment discrimination against Lufkin Industries, Inc. (Lufkin) culminated in a favorable multimillion dollar judgment and injunctive relief. Both parties subsequently challenged the district court's attorneys' fee award and Lufkin's complaint that back pay damages were erroneously authorized in an earlier appeal. The court affirmed as to the back pay damages but vacated and remanded as to the attorneys' fees. In particular, given the unrebutted evidence in the record that it was necessary for plaintiffs to retain counsel from outside the Eastern District of Texas, the district court abused its discretion in failing to use the rate counsel charged in their home district as the starting point in the lodestar calculation.

Defendants engaged in discovery misconduct that was sufficiently egregious to cause the district court to enter an order of default against them. Although defendants subsequently challenged the default order as erroneous, defendants did not challenge the order of default by way of a Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 55(c) or 60(b). At issue was whether Judge Real, a district court judge, had the power to impose default as a sanction for discovery misconduct and assuming such power, whether Judge Real abused his discretion by imposing default rather than lesser sanctions. The court held that defendants' failures to comply with orders of the court provided Judge Real with the power under Rule 37(b) to impose sanctions sua sponte, up to and including default and that Judge Wilson appropriately revisited previous orders of the court when he replaced Judge Real after Judge Real recused himself. The court also held that the district court possessed the power to impose the sanction of default and that the district court did not abuse its discretion by doing so. Accordingly, the judgment was affirmed.

The former (2001-2006) Assistant Secretary of State for Protocol Affairs at the Puerto Rico State Department sued the Secretary of State under 42 U.S.C. 1983, alleging that the official fired him due to his political affiliation. The district court dismissed, holding that plaintiff could be terminated without cause because he held a trust position for which party affiliation was an appropriate qualification, and fined plaintiff's attorneys $1000 each, concluding that the pleadings and responses that they submitted violated Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11(b). The First Circuit affirmed; plaintiff's position was not federally protected against political discrimination. The pleadings at issue consisted, in large part, of speculation and conclusory allegations lacking evidentiary support.

This dispute arose from the district court's decision to award an attorney $515,179.28 in attorney's fees pursuant to the Fair Labor Standards Act's fee shifting provision, 29 U.S.C. 216(b), for work performed in successfully litigating a case against the City of New York ("city"). The attorney did not keep contemporaneous records and the city appealed the award, arguing that it violated the New York State Ass'n for Retarded Children, Inc. v Carey rule, which explicitly required that such records be kept. The court held that, because a district court's "personal observation" of an attorney's work was not by itself a sufficient basis for permitting a deviation and awarding fees in the absence of contemporaneous records, the most recent order of the district court reinstating its original award of attorney's fees was vacated and the case remanded for further proceedings.