In a long-running case that has gone all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and back, a federal trial court has ordered the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to partially reimburse a company for $1.86 million in attorney’s fees it has had to incur in defending a meritless, agency-initiated class action lawsuit brought under Title VII, although the amount represents only a fraction of the fees the company has spent since the EEOC began the litigation in 2007.
In its 82-page opinion and order in EEOC v. CRST Van Expedited, Inc., No. 07-CV-95-LRR (N.D. Iowa September 22, 2017), the trial court, acting on instructions from the Supreme Court, awarded the company attorney’s fees of $1.86 million, but in a separate ruling rejected the company’s motion for $975,000 in supplemental fees to account for the additional expense associated with defending itself through an EEOC-initiated circuit court appeals process and its own pursuit of Supreme Court review.
The trial court observed that while the EEOC’s underlying litigation was adjudicated as frivolous and unreasonable – thus warranting the $1.86 million attorney’s fees award – the agency’s subsequent appeals were not frivolous. The court also found that there was no authority or basis for awarding fees incurred as a result of Supreme Court litigation that the company itself initiated.
Thus, in a case that CRST arguably should never have had to defend in the first place, and in the process has incurred nearly $10 million in fees to assert its rights, the company will end up getting only a small fraction of that amount.
A copy of the trial court’s opinion awarding the attorney’s fees is available here, and a copy of the court’s separate opinion denying the company’s motion for supplemental fees is available here.
Members of the Center for Workplace Compliance (CWC) can read more here.