The Pima County judge who presided over a lawsuit filed after two Cochise County board supervisors proposed expanding the post-election hand count of ballots has disallowed more than $25,000 in attorney’s fees and costs sought by the organization that filed the legal action.
Judge Casey McGinley issued an order Feb. 1 requiring Cochise County to pay $86,394 to attorneys for the Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans (AARA) for winning its lawsuit to stop two of the county’s supervisors from having County Recorder David Stevens conduct a more extensive ballot hand count than the minimum required under state law.
The order for fees came about after McGinley ruled in November that the extra ballot hand count was not permitted under state law. The legal question of whether McGinley’s decision was correct is now before the Arizona Court of Appeals, and the Legislature is also expected to address the issue this session.
In the meantime, AARA is entitled as the currently prevailing party to seek reimbursement for its attorney’s fees and court costs from Cochise County’s taxpayers.
But McGinley’s recent order makes clear he did not intend to give AARA’s attorneys –Elias Law Group of Washington, D.C. and Phoenix-based Herrera Arellano LLP– a blank check. Prior to issuing his order, the judge took a red pen to the request from the two law firms for $109,928.
McGinley rejected more than 20 percent of the claimed fees, noting “various instances where the fees sought either represent duplicated efforts on the part of attorneys in preparing for the hearing in this matter, or other fees which are not otherwise reasonable and necessary.”
The judge further described instances in which he denied fees which stemmed from “charging for multiple attorneys completing the same work, charging each attorney’s hourly rate for conferences among counsel, and charging fees for attending and reviewing meetings of the Board of Supervisors.”
McGinley also rejected nearly half of the court costs requested by Elias Law Group and Herrera Arellano LLP, approving only $2,222.74 of the $4,242.74 claimed by the two firms.
The court costs McGinley disallowed stemmed from efforts by the two law firms to have Cochise County taxpayers over the expenses for five non-resident attorneys to apply for pro hac vice admission by the State Bar of Arizona to participate in the case. Each admission costs $505.
McGinley noted only one of the five applicants actually took part in the court proceedings, and therefore he denied $2020 of the requested costs.
The total of the ordered fees and costs came to $88,616. In his order, McGinley specifically excluded Supervisor Ann English from responsibility for the bill as she opposed the expanded hand count effort.
However, as Supervisor Tom Crosby and Supervisor Peggy Judd were acting in their official elected capacity, their responsibility for the $88,616 will fall on taxpayers, if the award is sustained on appeal.