Lights flashing atop a police car. (Photo: Shutterstock)

A California appellate court has turned down a request from a lawyer seeking $308,000 in attorney fees for his initial representation of the family of a man shot and killed by Los Angeles County sheriff's department officers in 2016.

The Second District Court of Appeal on Wednesday affirmed a trial court decision granting Los Angeles attorney Michael Traylor just $17,325 from the $7 million settlement that lawyers who took over the case from him reached to settle the wrongful death and civil rights claims. The court found that Traylor hadn't handed over his files to the new lawyers and had submitted three separate accounts of time spent on the matter. In publishing the decision, the court noted it wanted to highlight that "contemporaneous time records" are the best evidence of an attorney's work.

"They are not indispensable, but they eclipse other proofs," wrote Second District Justice Shepard Wiley Jr. "Lawyers know this better than anyone. They might heed what they know."

In the underlying case, John Sweeney of The Sweeney Firm and Steven Glickman of Glickman & Glickman, both in Beverly Hills, ultimately took on the case for the family of Donta Taylor, who was shot and killed in a foot chase with two police deputies in 2016. The deputies claimed that Taylor had a handgun, but no weapon was found, and the county ultimately agreed in 2018 to pay $7 million in a settlement with Taylor's family.

Traylor, who had represented the family for a month following the shooting, filed an attorney's lien on the settlement. According to Wednesday's decision, Traylor gave Sweeney two invoices in October of that year, one for Taylor's father and one for his fiancee for his 2016 work on the case, both of which misspelled Donta Taylor's name. Traylor ultimately submitted three separate billing records claiming that he worked "130.0, 180.00, and 200.0 hours" on the case. The court referred to the numbers as "curiously round."

"Witnesses can be prone to bias when their own paychecks are at stake," wrote Wiley, joined in the decision by Justices Elizabeth Grimes and Maria Stratton. "And every lawyer who has kept time sheets knows delays in recordkeeping diminish accuracy. If you are a month late, it is hard to reconstruct a bygone day in six-minute intervals. Now increase the delay to two years. Perform this thought experiment: what were you doing two years ago today, down to six-minute intervals? These two risks aggravate each other: unless you kept detailed contemporaneous records according to some reliable method, common experience will lead observers to regard your tardy and self-serving six-minute claims as largely fictional."

"For this reason, wise lawyers keep accurate time records," Wiley concluded.

Reached by email Thursday, Traylor said he intended to file a petition for rehearing. Traylor said that this was not an hourly billing case and that California precedent allows for reasonable estimates in contingency fee cases and that Sweeney and Glickman had submitted varying estimates of their time in the case as well.

In a phone interview Thursday, Glickman said that he agrees that contingency lawyers should be compensated for their overall contributions to the success of a case. But, he added, Traylor hadn't provided any case files of witness interviews or "anything of substance" to substantiate his work on the case.

Glickman said that Traylor deserved some compensation for helping the family navigate an incredibly difficult time, but that it was hard to justify attorney fees for substantive work "when he never handed over any of his work product."