58°
Arnold, of Fort Lee, has been fighting with fellow attorney David Mazie, who took over the case, brought it to trial, and walked out of court with what originally was a $105 million settlement that later was pared to $25 million for young Antonia Verni’s Cliffside Park family.
For his trouble, Mazie got more than $4.6 million, while Arnold collected $227,500 — even though Mazie argued that she should have gotten nothing.
Arnold went in demanding half.
In a published interview, Mazie said Arnold did little on the case when he was finally brought in.
“I don’t think she deserved a dime,” he added.
In reversing the 2008 ruling that set the shares, the appeals panel sent the case back to Superior Court in Bergen County — only with a different judge.
The appeals court said Judge Robert Wilson inexplicably reduced the 2,500 hours Arnold claimed she spent on the case to 827 hours. He didn’t even explain how he arrived at the figure following a five-day evidentiary hearing, the judges said.
Such a “drastic” reduction “requires substantially more specific findings” than he provided, wrote Appellate Division Judges Mary Catherine Cuff, Edith Payne and Alexander Waugh Jr.
The judges also were angered by what they called Wilson’s “dismissive manner” and “undue intrusion” during testimony by one of Arnold’s witnesses. They also noted that Wilson made it clear he didn’t find Arnold credible, either.
Wilson pointed to Arnold’s contingency-fee retainer, which required a fee of $275 an hour if the Vernis decided to get another lawyer, which they ended up doing. The appeals court differed with Arnold’s reading of the clause but also pointed out that New Jersey has no guidelines addressing such provisions.
Because the drunk driver, Daniel Lanzaro, had only $100,000 in insurance, Arnold brought in other defendants, including the New York Giants, the National Football League, the New Jersey Sports & Exposition Authority and Giants Stadium, where Lanzaro had a staggering amount of beer during a game that day, as well as Aramark Corp., the stadium vendor that served him the beer before he smashed head-on into the Vernis’ vehicle in Hasbrouck Heights in Oct. 1999.
But she didn’t carry the ball all the way, Wilson ruled.
As the Appellate Court noted:
“Arnold prepared billing records of the time spent on the case, but she conceded at trial that these records had been ‘very poorly kept’ and thus had to be ‘reconstructed’ prior to submission to the court. The firm did not add up the total number of hours reflected in their time records, but Arnold estimated that the total was ‘approximately 2,600’ hours. Her brief fixes the number at ” ‘2500 hours’.”
“No back-up for [hourly billing records] exists and the explanation of the destruction of that back-up appears contrived,” the panel wrote, quoting Wilson.
“Arnold presented the judge with reconstructed time records,” they wrote. “The number of hours expended were derived from after-the-fact estimates because Arnold did not keep contemporaneous time records.
“[T]he record clearly reveals no trace or fruit of many hours claimed. For example, Arnold certified that she expended 400 hours on legal research; yet the expert retained by Arnold found not a single memorandum to reflect the fruits of this enormous amount of time….
“[S]he did not seem in full command of many facts that would advance her claim to a considerable portion of a hefty fee,” said the judges, who said they listened to hours of testimony on tape.
Arnold’s firm got very little for the grieving family, other than “the tendering of Mr. Verni’s own [automobile] insurance policy for $115,000,” Wilson found. “No offers to settle were ever made to the [firm] for the four and a half years [it] had the file.”
While calling Arnold “an experienced civil litigator” who had “created” a reputation for herself, Wilson said she “did not expend much actual efforts performing services” for the Vernis and that “it was her inexperienced sister who the clients believed were [sic] handling the case.”
Arnold argued that Wilson didn’t understand what a complicated case it was. However, the appeals court agreed with him on several other points — except the process he used to come up with her fee and his behavior toward those involved in the case, particularly Arnold’s witness.
“These circumstances support a fee award of less than the one-half sought by Arnold,” the appellate judges ruled. “Here, however, the judge discounted the hours advanced by Arnold by two-thirds. This is a drastic reduction.
“Moreover, applying the retainer agreement formula of hours multiplied by hourly rate, the judge allowed Arnold less than 5% of the fee award. Such a drastic discount requires substantially more specific findings than the judge provided in this case.”
Another judge in Hackensack will make the determination now. That jurist can recall witnesses and give Arnold’s expert another crack at testifying, it said.
“We have no confidence that [Wilson] fully and fairly considered all of the evidence in this case,” the appeals panel wrote.
That’s because the appeals judges said Wilson didn’t “maintain the atmosphere of impartiality and not demean or disparage the witness” and displayed “considerable impatience and irritation and skepticism about the opinion offered by Arnold’s expert.”
Even though it was a bench trial, they emphasized, “what [a trial court judge] does may be just as prejudicial to a defendant’s rights as if the case were tried by a jury.”
Click here to follow Daily Voice Hackensack and receive free news updates.
