In mulling a payment request by plaintiffs counsel who efficiently settled a wage-and-hour and discrimination case, a federal choose in Maryland rejected the notion that crafting the payment petition and subsequent reply accounted for greater than 19% of the whole work accomplished on the matter.
“It’s alarming to the court docket that plaintiffs’ counsel requests 26.9 hours for the submitting of its petition and reply,” U.S. Justice of the Peace Decide J. Mark Coulson of the District of Maryland wrote in a Feb. 7 opinion. “If the court docket had been to just accept that plaintiffs’ counsel put 26.9 hours of labor into the petition and reply, the court docket can be accepting the notion {that a} petition for attorneys’ charges can account for 19.4% of the whole work put right into a case.”