An opera singer who accepted Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd.‘s $300,000 offer of judgment to end his disability bias lawsuit is entitled to more than $1 million in attorneys’ fees and legal costs, a Miami federal judge ruled.
The $971,842 in fees the company must pay is less than half the $2.1 million Samuel Schultz’s lawyers sought in the Americans with Disabilities Act case, the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida said. A 30% reduction in the more than 4,000 hours Schultz’s counsel spent on the case was appropriate because the suit ended prior to trial and involved just one plaintiff. Royal Caribbean also isn’t required to foot the bill for Schultz’s decision to hire high-priced New York lawyers, the court said.
Schultz had every right to hire “the best possible employment lawyers,” Magistrate Judge Edwin G. Torres said. But the fee-shifting provisions requiring the company to pay Schultz prevailing party attorneys’ fees only entitle him to a “reasonable fee,” the judge said.
One of the New York lawyers, for example, was “a highly regarded civil rights attorney who rose to prominence as a leader of the ACLU in the 1970s,” the court said. Schultz sought an hourly rate of $975 for her work, but “nothing in the record” suggested that he could only hire someone of her stature or that he “needed to hire lawyers from New York at all,” the court...
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