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Counsel Concerns

By ALM Staff | Law Journal Newsletters |
March 28, 2007

Sanctions/Failure to Identify Documents. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld a sanction against lawyers for a defamation plaintiff for failure to comply, in good faith, with a court order to identify documents that would be relied on at trial. Muzikowski v. Paramount Pictures Corp., 05-3004. Little League baseball coach Robert Muzikowski had sued over the depiction of a coach in the film 'Hardball,' based on a non-fiction book about inner-city Little League teams with which Muzikowski had been involved. The appeals court found for the defendants on the ground that the depiction could be seen as innocent or defamatory. Also, the district court had adopted a magistrate's sanctions of $50,915 on Muzikowski's counsel ' Schuyler, Roche & Zwirner (SRZ) of Chicago ' for the 'reasonable expenses' to the Paramount defendants of sorting through 14,599 pages of documents from SRZ 'for possible use at trial.'

Assessing the amount of the sanction, the appeals court noted: 'Although SRZ contests reasonableness of the hours expended by Paramount's lawyers reviewing the documents Muzikowski produced, the magistrate judge characterized Paramount's figures as a low-ball estimate, explaining that the figure was 'reasonable especially in light of the fact that its attorneys realistically reviewed thousands of pages of documents far in excess of the 14,599 figure [on which the magistrate based the sanctions].' Nor are we convinced by SRZ's contention that the district court erred by basing its sanctions calculation on the hourly rate Paramount's lawyers charged defendants, rather than requiring Paramount to prove 'that the rates claimed are market rates' ' As far as we can tell, SRZ has never come forth with any evidence to show that the rates charged by Paramount's lawyers are not market rates. The district court therefore did not abuse its discretion by accepting these rates as reasonable.' 

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