Sasquatch Sightings And Other Improbable News: Texas Court Of Appeals Awards Lodestar Enhancement

Searches for mysterious creatures are hot again. We used to have to satisfy our curiosity by flipping through tabloids while waiting to pay for groceries or logging on to Wikipedia to stay up to date on the latest appearance of man-ape, alien, or the Loch Ness dragon. Now, entire cable television shows are dedicated to “searching” for such beings. Actual money and time is being spent on these “investigations,” and the motivation behind such decisions is open for public speculation.

Law has its own set of elusive curiosities. For class action litigators, an attorneys’ fees award that comes with a lodestar “enhancement” above 150% is the courtroom equivalent of passing a leprechaun on your morning jog. Young lawyers hear rumors about how once upon a time courts awarded attorneys’ fees above and beyond the lodestar (the reasonable hourly rate multiplied by the number of hours reasonably spent on a case). However, fee multipliers have been virtually extinct in federal courts for over a decade, and proof of a significant positive multiplier has been increasingly hard to substantiate even in state courts. Texas state courts are particularly unlikely jurisdictions for finding a positive multiplier above 1.5. But the wait is over. 

To read this blog post click here