A Hawaii architectural firm, which emerged victorious after a U.S. Labor Department lawsuit against its employee stock ownership plan, has requested the Ninth Circuit to revisit its recent opinion refusing to impose the government with attorneys’ fees.
The firm, Bowers & Kubota Consulting Inc., maintains that the Ninth Circuit’s October decision wrongly interpreted the standard for awarding fees pursuant to a federal law intended to discourage abusive government-related lawsuits. The suit had cast doubt over a $40-million employee stock plan transaction.
In a petition for rehearing filed on December 8 by the firm, it was stated that the court incorrectly switched the standard prescribed under the Equal Access to Justice Act. According to Bowers & Kubota, this Act denies attorneys’ fees when the government’s litigation position can be substantially justified.
Despite the firm’s successful defense, the defendants hoped that the Labor Department should be made to pay the lawyer’s fees as they argued the department failed to mount a substantially justified litigation position against them.
For further details, you can check the original report by Bloomberg Law.