Gold Mantis and MCC are former subcontractor and contractor of IPI.
One of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, Aaron Halegua of New York, recently asked the District Court for the NMI to issue an order awarding them attorney’s fees in the amount of $30,517.80.
Chief Judge Ramona V. Manglona previously granted the request of the plaintiffs to order Gold Mantis to produce discovery materials.
Judge Manglona directed Gold Mantis to obtain and produce financial records, tax records, and produce documents related to the People’s Republic of China and electronically stored information or ESI.
The judge also approved the award of attorney’s fees.
Halegua’s rate is $400 per hour; co-counsel Bruce Berline, $300 per hour; and two law student interns, $160 per hour.
Gold Mantis attorney Tiberius Mocanu opposes the $160 hourly rate for the two law student interns, Yun Zhang and Lulu Sun.
Mocanu said a former paralegal of Halegua was paid $125 an hour, and the two law interns are not law school graduates. “It is reasonable to conclude that much of the work they performed could have been performed by a seasoned paralegal,” Mocanu said.
“There is no U.S. Attorney’s Office attorney’s fees matrix available for a law student intern. Instead the only category that comes close is that for paralegals and clerks. Thus, in order to determine what has been found reasonable for interns, this court should look to cases which have addressed the prevailing rate for legal interns. $75 per hour [is] an appropriate fee in the Eastern District of New York,” Mocanu added.
For its part, the District Court for Connecticut found that an hourly rate of $100 an hour was reasonable for a legal intern or summer associate, Mocanu added.
“Generally hourly rates may be increased or reduced based on the complexity of the litigation.”
Here, he said, “the work performed did not touch on the complexities of bringing a claim under Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act.”
Instead, he added, “the work performed was basic research regarding discoverable material and composing a motion to compel. This type of work is not specialized but is instead standard legal work that any summer associate could have performed.”
Consequently, as there is case law from the general New York area supporting an hourly rate of between $75 and $1,000 an hour, this court should reduce the hourly rate of the two interns to $85 an hour, Mocanu said.
He said the plaintiffs’ entire request for attorney’s fees should be reduced by 25% as a portion of the work performed in bringing the motion to compel as well as the motion for attorney’s fees was already completed “as it is a duplication of the effort in filing a motion to compel against Imperial Pacific International LLC as well as a motion for attorney fees.”
Mocanu said although “the factual situation is different and [the] plaintiffs’ [attorneys] have done a thorough job reciting the facts that brought the litigation to this point, the substantive law and legal research necessary to bring the instant motion to compel as well as that of attorney’s fees remain the same. Both this instant motion as well as previous motions deal with the discoverability of financial documents, Electronically Stored Information or ESI, WeChat messages, and the duty to preserve evidence.”
Mocanu also noted that Halegua’s 13.56 hours of “editing, reviewing, drafting, and conducting his own legal research (billings from 8/27/20-9/3/20) was an addition to the 18.79 hours that Yun Zhang spent doing the same thing and the 9.97 hours that Lulu Sun spent doing legal research.”
Thus, “a total of 42.32 hours across three people were spent bringing a motion to compel, which essentially is similar in research and argument to that which was brought against IPI,” Mocanu said.
“It is clear that this effort was redundant and duplicative of work that at least in some part was performed previously for IPI.”
The federal court previously cited IPI for failing to fully comply with various discovery requirements related to such matters as producing bank records, employee separation dates, and paper discovery.
Judge Manglona then issued a default judgment against IPI, which is represented by attorney Michael Dotts.
The plaintiffs are Tianming Wang, Dong Han, Yongjun Meng, Liangcai Sun, Youli Wang, Qingchun Xu and Duxin Yan.
They are asking the federal court to issue an order awarding them $3.86 million in compensatory damages and $7.72 million in punitive damages.
MCC is represented by attorney Robert T. Torres.
