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day two of the trial starting shortly! i expect we’ll be hearing mostly about the issue of attorneys fees today. the plaintiffs are asking for $604,000 from the city.
is there anything less interesting than listening to people argue about cells on a spreadsheet you can’t see? i would submit that there is not.
deputy city attorney has started her cross examination of jock yellott who prepared the documentation on attorneys fees for the plaintiffs. the law does not allow them to collect for fees incurred on issues they did not win.
i believe she is going to argue that they did not properly separate out time spent on the issues related to the individual city councilors, all of whom have been dismissed from the suit.
our friends from yesterday haven’t shown up yet but i suspect they will at some point this afternoon
before lunch, defense counsel spent 90 minutes painstakingly asking yellott about individual entries in his billable hours, with dozens of individual entries for work done on issues that have been dismissed from the case & countless instances of work like collating & photocopying
while i am thoroughly convinced the document doesn’t correctly represent hours the plaintiffs are entitled to recover attorneys fees for, this is a bench trial & the defense has to balance thoroughness with the issue of the judge’s patience - she was definitely losing him.
when we get back in session, we’ll hear from the plaintiffs’ expert witness on the issue of attorneys fees, which probably means another couple of hours of discussion of a spreadsheet i can’t see!
if it’s any indication of how interesting the last two hours have been, at one point i didn’t even write anything down for about 20 minutes except this courtroom observation: “all old men look like different kinds of turtles” 🤷♀️
we took a fifteen minute recess and then immediately upon reconvening it was decided that we’ll pick back up at 9:30am tomorrow. can’t say i’m sad it’s over today - this has been excruciatingly dull.
