Holmes v. Am. Homepatient, Inc., 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 14627 (Pa. Middle District Ct., January 28, 2025) (Brann, J.)
In this case where Plaintiff lawyers achieve a significant result and became a prevailing party, in a civil rights case, the judge considered my affidavit in favor of the Plaintiffs. Plaintiffs sought to recover their attorneys’ fees. The Court said that it conducted a line by line review of the materials and that the requested hours do not align with the documentation submitted. However, they spent a awful amount of time discussing my affidavit, which really had nothing to do with the alignment of time with the documentation submitted.
The folks that I did the affidavit for, James G. Bordas and Thomas E. Anderson, were seeking $600 per hour. He wound up rewarding them $320 an hour. The Court pointed out that Holme’s burden is to establish a reasonable market rate. The Court also said it had to consider market rates in Williamsport “vicinage”. Although, Williamsport is not a separate vicinage but is part of the Middle District. The Court had previously set rates for attorneys in this area, experienced attorneys, at an $180 per hour to $325.27 per hour. The judge says he will revisit that. He said the rates requested are notably higher than the rates he had previously set for the Williamsport vicinage. After saying he considered my affidavit and another, he said, “Much of this evidence provides no insight into the market rate for comparable work in the Williamsport vicinage.”
He was dismissive of Ramage affidavit because he said that lawyer practiced mainly in Virginia, or West Virgina. It seems like the major evidence, therefore on rate, was my affidavit.
After going through my background, the Court states, “Much of this background does little to bolster Rieder’s ability to speak to attorneys’ fees in civil rights cases in this vicinage.”
He said my work in the 1985 Third Circuit judicial conference is, “…certainly on relevant topic…” but he then goes on to say that it is, “stale”.
After reciting my talking with other attorneys who handle civil rights cases he says, “These vague statements fail to demonstrate that he is familiar with the market rate for civil rights cases in the Williamsport vicinage.”
He said that serving as an expert witness in fee cases and examining fee petitions, “fails for lack of specificity”. He agrees with me that a district wide rate will result in attorneys being over or under-compensated depending upon their location. The judge then goes on to acknowledge that this is true since Scranton/Wilkes-Barre and Harrisburg contain larger legal markets. “Yet he fails to appreciate that the Third Circuit has instructed this Court to look to the vicinage in which it sits, not the entire district as a relevant community.”
He points out that my affidavit explained why I am knowledgeable with Middle District rates, and then he simply dismisses it by pointing out that my most recent case was a civil rights case in Virigina. He says, “This does not support a familiarity with the prevailing rates in the Williamsport vicinage.” His major quarrel with my affidavit is that according to him the Third Circuit required that the rates be those in the “relevant vicinage”. He finds my description of how I charge as “confusing”.
He says that “…yet there was no indication that he is billed at the rate of $750 an hour in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, much less the Williamsport vicinage, for a civil rights case.”
He then points out that most of my practice is comprised of medical malpractice and personal injury work which “reinforces his conclusion”.
He further points out my statement that only “Bernardi” is my work billed at “$750 an hour”. He then decides to increase his 2014 rates by $50. Therefore, he sets a new range of hourly rates in the Williamsport vicinage $232 to $375 dollars per hour for experienced attorneys with associates at a slightly lesser rate.
He reduced the paralegal rate from $175 to $150. He reduced another paralegal’s rate from $175 to $115. He then, later on in his Opinion, discusses the enhancement of the loadstar because of its excess. He comes back to my affidavit and then quotes extensively. He says that the affidavit fails to produce “…any evidence at all regarding the inadequacy of the loadstar.”
He says that the case was uncomplicated, and that it was a fault of Defendant said Plaintiffs 1. He then went on to say, “Rieder’s observation is ‘Do not move the needle on this analysis’.”
He says he has lots of civil rights cases filed in front of him and that the outcome was not “unexpected”. He then says that he washed all the attorneys, and the result in this case came down to “inferior” performance by defense counsel … “an unexpectedly sympathetic jury, or simply luck” rather than superior performance by Plaintiff’s counsel.
The rates for support staff are pretty good and should be noted.
