A California appellate court has sided with Los Angeles litigation boutique Baker Marquart in vacating an arbitration award a former client won in a fee dispute.

The Second District Court of Appeal on Wednesday knocked out the $105,028 award. The court found the arbitration panel that heard the case improperly relied on arguments that lawyers for former Baker Marquart client James Kantor raised in a brief that was provided to arbitrators, but not the firm.

The Second District ruled that the award should be vacated under California's Code of Civil Procedure since it was procured by “undue means” and Baker Marquart had “no meaningful or adequate opportunity to respond to the new claims” in Kantor's ex parte brief to arbitrators.

“This is neither fair nor proper,” wrote Justice Elwood Lui in the 20-page opinion.

Lui was joined in the opinion by Justices Judith Ashmann-Gerst and Victoria Chavez.

Baker Marquart managing partner Ryan Baker said Thursday the published opinion was important beyond his own firm's dispute since it “put a fine point” on the need for arbitrators to give parties their due process rights. “This sort of arbitration by ambush is simply not acceptable under any circumstances,” he said.

In the underlying case, Baker Marquart represented Kantor in litigation against his stepmother and her accountant seeking to remove them as trustees on trust accounts where Kantor was a beneficiary. Kantor received a $1.6 million settlement in the case and Baker Marquart received a 35 percent contingency fee, or $600,000, based on its completion of nine “minimum tasks” outlined in the firm's fee agreement. About a year after the settlement, Kantor filed a demand for fee arbitration, claiming the contingency fee should have been 30 percent because the firm “did not complete tasks 1 and 9.”

However, in a confidential brief that was provided to the panel, Kantor argued the firm not only failed to complete the first and last tasks, but also the remaining seven. An arbitration panel with the Beverley Hills Bar Association sided with Kantor and awarded him the partial refund, citing some of the additional tasks as part of their reasoning.

Baker Marquart asked a Los Angeles Superior Court judge to vacate the award, but the judge below upheld the award, finding that the firm “failed to perform tasks and that these tasks were the guarantee that the legal services would be properly provided.”

The Second District, however, found that the ex parte confidential brief had “corrupted” the arbitration panel process and vacated the award.

Lui, the administrative presiding justice of the court, wrote that even though Baker Marquart knew the details of its work for Kantor and was allowed to answer arbitrators' questions, “that does not make up for the fact that, going into the arbitration hearing and through no fault of its own, Baker Marquart was unaware the contingency rate might be reduced based on its alleged failure to perform any task other than tasks one and nine.”

“Kantor's ex parte confidential brief gave him an unfair advantage at the arbitration because, as a result of that brief, he and the panel were prepared to consider and to argue all the tasks as well as the issue of an accounting,” he wrote.

Ryan Baker said the published decision provides important guidance to arbitrators and the parties coming before them that due process and fair play should apply to those proceedings, especially as overburdened courts encourage parties to adopt them.

Kantor's lawyers, Eric Nishizawa of Marina Del Rey and Robert Gerstein of Santa Monica, didn't respond to messages Thursday.