Lawyers from Dechert and the American Civil Liberties Union are seeking nearly $52,000 in legal fees and expenses for the work they spent on wrangling over Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach's compliance with court orders in a voting rights case.

U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson found Kobach in civil contempt last month for violating orders in the case, a dispute over the state's documentary proof-of-citizenship law. Robinson in 2016 issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the law, which requires new voter registrants show documents to prove citizenship.

Kobach “has a history of noncompliance with the preliminary injunction order,” Robinson wrote in her contempt ruling in April. “He not only willfully failed to comply with the preliminary injunction for five months, but then only partially complied in October 2016 upon the threat of contempt.” Kobach, represented by the Kansas secretary of state's legal office, has taken the order to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.

Robinson permitted “reasonable” fees as a sanction for the contempt. Teams from Philadelphia-based Dechert and the ACLU on May 7 filed a petition seeking $51,646.

“Litigating the underlying contempt motion required the investment of a significant number of attorney and paralegal hours,” the lawyers wrote in their fee petition.

The attorneys said they spent about 133 hours on the contempt motion and associated communication. The number of hours was driven up, according to the lawyers, “by the defendant's repeated refusals to cooperate on, and instead choosing to litigate, the relatively simple matters underlying the contempt motion.”

A lawyer for Kansas, Sue Becker, was not immediately reached for comment Friday.

The senior lawyers for the plaintiffs, including the League of Women Voters of Kansas, were Neil Steiner, a Dechert white-collar partner in New York; Dale Ho, director of the ACLU Voting Project; and Stephen Bonney, former legal director of the Kansas ACLU.

Steiner, Ho and Bonney asked for compensation at an hourly rate of $450, an amount they called “reasonable for complex civil litigation in the Kansas City market.” The petition said the $450 rate “is also less than half of what Dechert customarily charges its for-profit clients.”

Steiner, a Dechert partner since 2006, generally bills at $1,140 an hour, according to a declaration. The petition also noted Dechert's Angela Liu in Chicago, an associate since 2012, typically bills $850 an hour, and junior associate Tharuni Jayaraman at $565 hourly. A lawyer with Ho's experience would clock in at $915 an hour as a Dechert partner, according to the fee petition.

The plaintiffs lawyers said they tried to keep costs low, “as much work as possible on the underlying contempt motion and related papers was performed by qualified attorneys with lower hourly billing rates … instead of more experienced attorneys who charge higher hourly rates.”

Kobach formerly led the Trump administration's “voter integrity” commission, which has since disbanded. The commission's push last year to obtain voter data from states drew a series of lawsuits.

The fee petition from the ACLU and Dechert is posted below:

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