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Sawyer v. Westchester Fire Insurance Company11/20/2002
necessity for, expert testimony. [Citations.] The trial court makes its determination after consideration of a number of factors, including the nature of the litigation, its difficulty, the amount involved, the skill required in its handling, the skill employed, the attention given, the success or failure, and other circumstances in the case.'" (Id. at p. 1096, citing Melnyk v. Robledo (1976) 64 Cal.App.3d 618, 623-624.)
St. Paul asserts that appellants offered almost no evidence concerning the actual legal work performed by the State's attorneys, and that although the State's attorney, Robin Hoff, "attended some depositions and conducted some written discovery," he filed an untimely joinder in MCM's motion for summary judgment and did little else to defend the State. St. Paul also asserts that Lee presented a "lackluster" defense of the State after taking over for Hoff, and that it "is clear that little or no skill was employed by the State's attorneys, little or no attention was given to the case, and their defense was a complete failure."
St. Paul overstates the evidence. Both Hoff and Lee testified that the State considered the underlying actions to be important cases and Lee evaluated the State's potential exposure on a jury verdict for appellants to be $10 to $20 million. Hoff testified that he remembered the cases well because the freeway project was a long-term project and that he spent time locating witnesses, engineers and the applicable plans and drawings, interviewed the engineers and witnesses, reviewed the plans and drawings, produced "thousands or many hundreds" of documents and at least nine volumes of pleadings, and that he attended two days' of the deposition of the resident engineer and took the deposition of plaintiff Paul Lane and MCM's construction manager, Vernon Paine. In reviewing the sufficiency of the evidence to support a judgment, the appellate court does not reweigh the evidence, but merely determines "whether, on the entire record, there is substantial evidence, contradicted or uncontradicted, which will support the determination, and when two or more inferences can reasonably be deduced from the facts, a reviewing court is without power to substitute its deductions for those of the trial court." (Bowers v. Bernards (1984) 150 Cal.App.3d 870, 873-874.) We conclude that there is substantial evidence to support the attorney fees award.
St. Paul suggests that that it was improper for the trial court to use its own expertise in evaluating the legal services provided by the State's attorneys in the underlying actions because it did not preside over those actions. But nothing in PCLM, which St. Paul cites in this regard, requires that the trial court be one and the same.
St. Paul also contends that no fees should have been awarded for time recorded after appellants and the State entered into the November 4, 1997 stipulated judgment, which St. Paul claims would exclude "well over half of the total hours claimed." We disagree. In the absence of evidence showing that these hours were recorded for work not actually performed on the State's behalf, appellants are entitled to recover fees for these recorded hours.
Finally, St. Paul contends that the trial court erred to the extent that it applied an hourly rate of more than $125. As mentioned above, the trial court did not specify what hourly rate it was using to calculate the award. But the fact that $125 was the hourly rate St. Paul paid for the defense of MCM in the underlying actions and was the rate it was paying to the State at the time for defense of other construction accident cases, did not obligate the trial court to use this rate. Under PCLM, the trial court has broad discreti
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