I met with Paul Thissen last Sunday, and he assured me that after doing further research into the bill he sponsored, he changed his mind and withdrew the bill. It is dead.
Minnesota DFL’ers are inexplicably out to eviscerate Minnesota consumer protection laws. Representative Paul Thissen (DFL), Representative Dave Olin (DFL), and Senator Linda Scheid (DFL) have teamed up on HR 1410, a bill that would require judges to “take into consideration the reasonableness of the attorney fees sought in relation to the amount of damages awarded to the prevailing party.”
Maybe that sounds innocent, or even logical, on its face. If the damages awarded to the prevailing party are small, shouldn’t the attorney fees be small, as well?
Sure, if you want all laws with small damages provisions (i.e., most consumer protection laws on the books) to be virtually meaningless.
If enacted, HR 1410 would result in a drastic increase in wasted court time, attorney resources, and dissuade Minnesota citizens from seeking redress when their rights are violated. And hey, what better time to water down consumer protection laws than during an economic recession caused, in part, by lax enforcement of weak consumer protection laws?
For example, a landlord who changes the locks in order to exclude a tenant is liable for $500 plus attorney fees and costs. $500 is not a lot of money. Certainly not worth hiring a lawyer over. Recognizing this, to ensure that tenants could actually sue their landlords for locking them out, the legislature decided to make the landlord pay the tenant’s lawyer.
This makes a small damages award into a meaningful consumer protection law. The tenant can bring the case with a lawyer’s help, and the landlord has a strong incentive to pay up for clear violations. Reasonable attorney fees for starting a lawsuit will be less than the typical landlord’s retainer fee in most cases. Since there is a strong incentive to settle quickly, these cases should not clog the court’s docket.
If the landlord is stubborn and decides to fight, he or she will ultimately pay the plaintiff’s attorney for that stubbornness.
But HR 1410 would undo all of that. If judges must make small attorney fee awards for small damages awards, the landlord can be as stubborn as he or she likes, causing the plaintiff’s lawyer to incur tens of thousands of attorney fees. Under HR 1410, those fees would get chopped to virtually nothing, even though it was the landlord who caused all that expense, clogged the court’s docket, and wasted all that time.
Contrary to what those behind HR 1410 will likely say, plaintiffs’ lawyers are not out to churn attorney fees. It is defendants who decide whether the plaintiff’s attorney fees are great or small.
HR 1410 also includes a strange attempt to re-write Minnesota’s procedural Rule 68. It is strange for two reasons. First, because the courts are in charge of their procedural rules, not the legislature. Second, because Rule 68 was recently amended to address exactly the problem that HR 1410 addresses. Perhaps those behind HR 1410 ought to try out the rule as written before attempting to rewrite it to no purpose.
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