Appellants tell court trial judge wrongly cut attorney fees after RV settlement

James P. Feynman, appellant counsel, told the court the trial judge found his clients’ fee request—about $24,885—reasonable but effectively prevented recovery of that amount by excluding the hours his firm spent trying to collect the award.

“The trial court found that my original bill of $24,885 was reasonable,” Feynman said, arguing the court erred as a matter of law by deducting nearly 19.43 hours the judge described as time spent “to come here to recover your fees.” He asked the court to vacate the judgment below and remand for an award of the full attorneys’ fees without the post‑settlement deduction.

The appeal centers on whether the trial court applied the proper reasonableness standard to what counsel called “fees on fees” — the time spent securing a previously recognized fee award — and whether the record supports a total exclusion of those collection hours.

Danielle Giro, counsel for General RV Center and Keystone RV Company, told the bench the question on appeal is not whether the Butchers were entitled to fees in the abstract but whether the trial court abused its discretion in awarding approximately $24,000 given the facts and circumstances of the case. Giro emphasized that, although the parties exchanged fee figures during settlement talks, the respondent companies did not receive an itemized fee statement until months later.

“We didn’t receive any itemization of those fees until approximately 4 months later,” Giro said, describing the lack of contemporaneous time records and billing inaccuracies that she said made it impossible to assess the reasonableness of the claimed post‑settlement hours. She characterized the late and retrospective fee petition as a “self‑inflicted wound” that justified the trial court’s scrutiny and reductions.

Justices pressed both sides with hypotheticals about burden of proof and the scope of judicial discretion. One justice asked whether a trial court could find that post‑settlement collection work was unreasonable if a claimant presented only a lump sum without contemporaneous support; the bench noted that a court acting as factfinder could reasonably pare back hours that lacked evidentiary support.

Feynman acknowledged a court could, in theory, reduce particular hours as unreasonable but said that was not what the trial court had done here; instead, he said, the court’s order effectively prevented recovery of fees necessary to secure the fee award in the first place. He added that withholding recovery of collection efforts undermines fee‑shifting statutes that enable consumers to litigate against larger manufacturers and dealers.

Respondents and the bench also discussed billing errors in the fee petition, including misallocated associate time that the trial court adjusted, and the timing: the underlying claim settled in March 2023, a fee demand arrived in May 2023, and the itemization accompanied the formal fee petition filed roughly four months later.

At oral argument’s close, Feynman reiterated his request that the Supreme Court vacate the lower court’s judgment and remand for a reconsideration of fees on the record; Giro defended the trial court’s evaluation of the totality of facts and the plaintiffs’ burden to demonstrate reasonableness. The court took the case under advisement; no decision was announced from the bench.