TRENTON, N.J. (Legal Newsline) – A judge let her experience in private practice affect her decision on whether to cut fees for class action lawyers, a New Jersey appeals court recently ruled.
On July 29, the Appellate Division told Monmouth County judge Mara Zazzali-Hogan to try again, after she had reduced fees that would have been awarded to The Wolf Law Firm and The Law Offices of Christopher J. McGinn.
The two pursued a class action against Shrewsbury Volkswagen over alleged Truth-in-Consumer Contract, Warranty, and Notice Act violations.
Zazzali-Hogan ruled last year that those lawyers did not justify the $162,000 they requested, which represented nearly half the recovery for the settlement class. Zazzali-Hogan cut the hourly rates lawyers at those firms tried to charge and added a 5% enhancement, rather than the 25% requested.
Lawyers would have ended up with about $120,000 had Zazzali-Hogan not been overruled by the Appellate Division.
“Class Counsel’s undisputed submissions mirrored the certifications deemed acceptable in Rendine,” Judge Greta Gooden Brown wrote.
“In rejecting Class Counsel’s submissions and reducing the hourly rate for all the attorneys and the paralegal, the judge relied on her personal experience in private practice, a methodology rejected in Walker.”
Class members received $125 apiece under the settlement. Zazzali-Hogan reduced the attorneys’ hourly rates by as much as $190 per hour when she came up with a final amount. She combed through the firms’ work in a 48-page decision, also finding that the case was relatively simple and didn’t require as many hours as was charged.
“Unfortunately here, the support for the fees consisted of recycled or boilerplate certifications with no reference to any details about this case,” Zazzali-Hogan wrote.
But she wrote that she relied on “fifteen years or private practice” when reaching her decision – a key point for the Appellate Division, which remanded the case for her to find a new formula to calculate fees.