High court rules on attorney fees

Attorneys who prevail in lawsuits brought in the public interest are entitled to compensation for their work, the California Supreme Court ruled in a unanimous decision Thursday.

Both liberal and conservative lawyers had urged the state high court to award fees to three law firms whose attorneys spent years trying to get the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to require private employers of prison labor to pay wages comparable to non-inmate workers’ wages.

The Prison Inmate Labor Initiative of 1990 created the comparable-wages requirement to prevent the use of prisoners as strikebreakers or to undercut law-abiding workers. The initiative also was intended to maximize prisoner earnings, about 80% of which the state collects for taxes, room and board and victim restitution and to support family members outside.

“When the state didn’t insist on comparable wages, it shortchanged itself and shortchanged the restitution fund,” said Robert Berke, lead attorney in the taxpayer action settled after the case went to court in San Diego four years ago.

“This makes sure the courthouse door is open to groups of lawyers and clients who have demonstrated that their involvement has served the public good,” Berke said.

The prison wage case was brought under the so-called private attorney general statute, under which a court may award attorney fees to the successful party in an action that has resulted in the enforcement of an important right affecting the public interest. Such lawsuits typically target government agencies.

But prior rulings in cases where defendants changed behavior under threat of litigation but before suit was filed, known as catalyst cases, resulted in restrictions on when public interest attorneys could get paid for their work.

The high court had ruled that lawyers had to show they’d made an attempt to resolve the dispute before litigating, “to discourage meritless suits motivated by the hope of fees.”

In the prison wage case, Vasquez vs. State of California, the high court concluded that the lawyers’ success in pushing the state to adequately charge prisoner employers benefited the public. It ordered that $1.25 million in fees be paid to the firms involved in the nine-year effort.

The office of state Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown had challenged the attorney fees award on the grounds that earlier rulings held that public interest lawyers needed to make an attempt at resolving the issue before suing, to show that litigation was necessary.

Supervising Deputy Atty. Gen. Ed Weil said Brown’s office had hoped the court would extend the need to show necessity for litigation to all such cases but expressed only mild disappointment that the justices “didn’t go quite as far as we thought they should.”

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c arol.williams@latimes.com