State seeks cut in fee request for school suit

Attorneys for the state are asking a federal judge to dramatically discount the $3.3 million in fees requested by a legal team that represents black students in the 31-year-old Pulaski County school desegregation lawsuit.

The request for the state-paid fees "relies upon inadequate and legally deficient documentation," Senior Assistant Attorney General Scott Richardson wrote to U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr. in response to the petition submitted last month on behalf of the Joshua intervenors' team of lawyers and assistants.

"Counsel for the Joshua intervenors claim they worked 8,381.97 hours, but they provide time and billing records for only 521.57 hours," Richardson wrote. "In other words, the Joshua intervenors can only document 6 percent of their requested hours. The remainder is based on impermissible estimates that federal courts have routinely refused to accept."

According to the filing, the team calculated about $1.9 million in fees and is seeking that amount plus an additional 75 percent. Attorneys Hank Bates and John C. Williams of Little Rock filed the request for the Joshua team, citing the complexity and duration of the case, its toll on the reputation of the attorneys and their time to devote to other cases.

The lack of documentation and other problems with the fee request justify " a denial of the majority" of the fees, Richardson said in the 36-page response.

He asked that the legal team be paid only the prevailing market rates "for reasonable, properly documented hours worked.

"Alternatively," he said, "if the Court decides to award a fee for the undocumented time, the total award should not exceed the $500,000." That is the amount provided for the Joshua intervenors in a Jan. 13 landmark settlement in the long-running case.

The Joshua legal team -- led by state Rep. John Walker, D-Little Rock, and consisting of two other lawyers and two assistants -- asked in June for $3,319,061.69 for work performed on behalf of the class of all black students for a period starting in November 1993 and extending to last month. The requested rates range between $75 and $400 an hour.

Bates and Williams told the judge that the work of the legal team will benefit the Joshua class of black students by $263 million in future state payments to the school districts as a result of the recent settlement agreement. That is on top of the $1.3 billion that the state has already paid to the districts as a result of the federal lawsuit.

The requested fees amount to 0.21 percent of the $1.56 billion benefit to the class, Bates and Williams wrote. They would be 1.25 percent of the $263 million the districts will receive as a result of the settlement agreement, they said.

Bates said Monday that he was reviewing Richardson's response, which was sent to the judge Thursday. Bates and Williams will submit their response to the judge by the end of the month.

The exchange of arguments over legal fees comes after Marshall's January approval of the settlement that dealt largely with ending nearly $70 million per year in state desegregation aid to the three Pulaski County school districts after the 2017-18 school year. The settlement provided for $500,000 in state-paid legal fees to the Joshua intervenors "unless contested, in which event the Court may award a reasonable fee unless otherwise agreed upon."

Bates and Williams said in the June filing that no agreement was reached.

Richardson argued to the judge that the Joshua intervenors' years of delay in asking for the fees hurts the state's ability to respond to the fee request, because people involved in the case have either moved on or their memories about the case have faded.

He also said that only 282.36 of the 521.57 hours documented by the intervenors are tied to opposition to the Arkansas Department of Education. And about 70 of those hours are excessive, unnecessary or duplicative, leaving 212.36 hours in documented, reasonably expended time.

At a rate of $300 per hour, the resulting fees paid by the state would amount to $63,708, he said.

Walker is seeking $400 an hour for 2,771.27 hours since 1993. Robert Pressman of Lexington, Mass., is seeking $325 per hour for 468.6 hours, and Austin Porter is seeking $300 an hour for 52.97 hours.

Joy Springer, a paralegal and monitor of desegregation efforts in the three school districts, is listed as working 4,753.13 hours and is seeking a fee of $125 an hour, amounting to $594,141.25. Evelyn Jackson, a legal assistant who represented the Joshua intervenors on the Magnet Review Committee that set policy for magnet schools, is seeking payment of $75 an hour for 336 hours, which would amount to $25,200.

Most of the hourly rates were established by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at St. Louis in a 2012 chapter of the desegregation case, Bates and Williams said in their petition.

But Richardson said the hourly rates "are out of step with current rates, and are vastly out of step with rates charged at the times most of the fees were incurred."

He argued that the 8th Circuit did not analyze the rates requested in 2012 for Walker or Pressman. He speculated that that may have been because the requested totals for the two attorneys were not as significant as the totals at the time for other attorneys in the case.

Richardson told the judge that some of the hours claimed by the legal team are about issues and conflicts between the Joshua intervenors and the school districts, not the state Education Department.

He also said there are hours requested by the legal team for meetings that occurred, according to contemporaneous time and billing records kept by attorneys for the school districts. However, the presence of the Joshua representatives at the meetings is not always reflected in those records.

Metro on 07/22/2014