When it came to seeking $171,260 in legal fees for winning a back wages lawsuit in front of a jury last year, a team from Hayber, McKenna & Dinsmore looked for items to leave out of their request before submitting their final motion.

Anticipating pushback from opposing counsel, the firm eliminated charges related to every point they had lost at trial but held firm on the final bill. Last July, a jury ruled in favor of Hayber client Danelle Martin, in a lawsuit seeking back pay for her work at the DoubleTree Hilton in Windsor Locks.

Jurors found Martin, a former bartender at the hotel's Shade Bar and Grill, was entitled to two years' back pay, totaling about $34,000. But attorneys' fees would come to more than five times that amount.

Defendants from the hotel's parent companies—United Capital Corp. and AFP Management Corp.—fought the attempt to collect. They argued a demand for $171,250 was unreasonable, considering relatively small judgment. Based on their calculations, Martin's attorneys would be entitled to no more than $22,560 in fees.

But Superior Court Judge Thomas Moukawsher disagreed, and ultimately granted the larger request based on Hayber's calculations.

In a  13-page ruling June 8, Moukawsher said rates of $400 per hour for Hayber founding partner Richard Hayber and $250 per hour for associates Thomas Durkin and Lori Knuth qualified as reasonable. He also explained that Connecticut's Minimum Wage Act entitles winning plaintiffs to seek "reasonable" fee awards in cases involving back wages.

"Yes, a large amount of fees yielded a comparatively small recovery," Moukawsher wrote. But that is what the fee provision for these mostly small wage violation claims is about. As the Second Circuit recognized in 1999 in Quarantino v. Tiffany Co., without such disproportionate fee recoveries, cases like this would be 'too small to attract effective legal representation.' The act assumes that fee recoveries will sometimes be disproportionate, but by making fees mandatory the legislature created an incentive for lawyers to help enforce this law."

Reflecting on the ruling, Durkin said a favorable outcome had been expected. "We would have gotten a fee no matter what. The question is the amount of the fee," he said. "If you try to sneak items in on issues we lost at trial, that might be looked at with prejudice by the judge. We went through our records and combed out everything we spent time on but did not win at trial. We only put in the fees for the issues we won and presented that to the court. Honesty is always the best policy."

Durkin continued: "I think the most important lesson here for attorneys to learn is that if they take up causes for plaintiffs in wage act claims and or civil right cases, the courts will compensate them for their time."

In his ruling, Moukawsher said, "AFP Management's biggest claim is that Martin wasn't very successful with her claim, so she shouldn't be very successful with her claim for fees either."

The judge said he disagreed with the defense's logic.

"Nothing about considering fees requires the court to ignore the relative significance of a party's multiple claims—to distinguish between a tail and a dog. The main claim here was for the full minimum wage and penalties for not paying it. Martin won this claim. This isn't to say it was a frivolous claim. Despite opposition, the court sent the issue to the jury. But losing this long shot didn't make Martin's win what AFP Management calls it: 'a colossal lack of success.'"

In last year's ruling, the jury found the defendants should have paid Martin the full minimum wage for her work as a bartender, as opposed to a lower service wage for non-bartending hours worked. The full minimum wage at the time was $10.10 per hour, and the lower hourly wage for non-service work, including tasks other than serving food, was $6.38.

Representing the defense were Emanuel Kataev and Jamie Felsen of New Hyde Park, New York-based Milman Labuda Law Group. Kataev didn't respond to a request for comment and Felsen declined to comment.

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