9th Circuit Says Supreme Court Meant What It Said In Gisbrecht

From the opinion of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Crawford v. Astrue, released today:

We review three consolidated appeals that present one overarching issue: Did the district court follow the mandate of Gisbrecht v. Barnhart, 535 U.S. 789 (2002), in determining the amount of attorneys’ fees awarded to lawyers who successfully represented Social Security disability insurance (“SSDI”) claimants in federal court under contingent-fee contracts? We hold in each case that it did not. We vacate the district courts’ orders and grant the attorneys the contingencybased fees they requested. ...

By beginning with the lodestar calculation, the district courts plainly failed to respect the “primacy of lawful attorney-client fee agreements.” Gisbrecht, 535 U.S. at 793. ...

These cases vividly demonstrate the deleterious effect of a district court’s failure to recognize the distinction between fee-shifting cases and cases involving payment by the claimant from his benefit award. ...

The district court orders quote extensively from Gisbrecht. They even cursorily discuss the character of the representation—noting that it was skillful and not dilatory—before concluding that the requested fee would represent a windfall to the attorneys. But this parroting of language from Gisbrecht does not mean that the district courts actually applied its teachings.

There have been a lot of District Courts around the country that have done what the Court of Appeals condemned in this case.