Texas Supreme Court Grapples with Calculating Attorney's Fees in Employment Discrimination Cases

Today, in El Apple I, Ltd. v. Olivas, the Texas Supreme Court held that, just as in federal Title VII employment discrimination cases, attorneys seeking fees under the Texas Commission on Human Rights Act's (TCHRA's) fee-shifting provision must submit itemized and detailed records of time spent on various tasks to get a fee award, which is calculated by the lodestar method. This is not particularly surprising since the TCHRA is meant to be identical to Title VII, and federal courts have long required attorneys to submit detailed and contemporaneously kept time records to justify fee awards under Title VII and other federal fee-shifting statutes.This also accords with the policy behind lodestar calculations: Since fee awards are supposed to reflect what you would have been paid in the private market, your records should be kept in at least as much detail as if you were billing your client. 

What is surprising is that, before today, Texas law did not require attorneys to submit detailed time records to justify lodestar-calculated fee awards---attorneys could just submit affidavits estimating the total number of hours they worked on things like "trial" or "discovery." As such, the Court remanded to allow the attorneys to beef up their fee application.

Justice Hecht, joined by two other justices, wrote a concurring opinion in which he contended that the plaintiff's lawyers' purported amount of time spent on the case was patently unreasonable, detailed records or no.

Comments

[Family Lawyers]

That's a serious issue. I hope you can solve that and I think government should take good concern on this. Discrimination cases nowadays is going so slow to solve so I hope you can have solution on that soon.

[criminal attorny]

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