Attorney Fees for In-house Counsel’s Litigation Work
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Massachusetts has joined an increasing number of states that allow trial courts to award attorney fees to in-house counsel for work on litigation.
Peter Jarvis, a partner in the Portland, Ore., office of Holland & Knight, coauthored an article on the May ruling by the Massachusetts Court of Appeals. “It just makes sense,” Jarvis told CorpCounsel.com. “And I think most corporations are certainly going to be comfortable with this.”
The case is the first time a Massachusetts court has ruled on the question, and it involved an unfair business practices statute.
The defendants had argued that the $152,906 fee request from in-house attorney George Stanbury should be rejected because he was a full-time salaried employee of the plaintiff company, and because he failed to include time records for his services. Stanbury was the lead attorney in the trial.
Judge R. Marc Kantrowitz, writing for the panel, sided with Stanbury. “On a practical level … every hour spent on the litigation was an hour when Stanbury’s efforts were directed away from other [company] legal matters,” Kantrowitz wrote. To deny attorney fees to the company “in this case simply because it chose to utilize its own in-house counsel would undercut the deterrent purposes of [the statute] and would implicitly reward the defendants for their questionable behavior.”
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