Mariah Carey’s legal team undertook $186,000 worth of work responding to a motion for summary judgement filed as part of a song-theft dispute over her hit ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’.
Carey wants the songwriters who pursued that litigation to cover all those costs after a judge not only dismissed their song-theft lawsuit but also ruled that the motion in question was full of “frivolous legal arguments and unsupported factual contentions”.
To reach that $186,000 legal bill, the lawyers who prepared Carey’s response to the motion for summary judgement in the song-theft case have “substantially discounted” their standard hourly rates, a court filing this week explains. In case you wondered, the “substantially discounted” rates work out at $374 to $995 an hour, depending on the experience of the lawyer.
Three lawyers from Davis Wright Tremaine LLP worked on the response, this week’s filing reveals. “Peter Anderson, a partner with nearly 45 years experience litigating copyright and entertainment matters; Eric Lamm, a seventh-year associate who also has substantial experience in copyright and entertainment litigation; and Ben Planchon, a 25 year veteran paralegal”.
“Mr Anderson’s services were billed at $995 per hour”, the court filing says, while “Mr Lamm’s services were billed at $615 per hour, and Mr Planchon’s services were billed at $374 per hour”. Not only are these rates discounted from what these lawyers usually charge, the filing insists, but they are also “substantially below the median peer rates”.
Rules regarding whether or not the losing side in a legal battle have to cover the other side’s costs vary from country to country and, sometimes, according to the kind of dispute. In the US, copyright law in particular does provide scenarios in which the attorney fees have to be covered by the losing side.
Where the defendants in a copyright infringement claim win, they may be able to seek the legal costs associated with mounting the defence if they can show that the other side made “frivolous” filings or claims, or acted in bad faith. Which is what the Carey side alleged in this dispute.
Songwriters Vince Vance and Troy Powers claimed that Carey’s seminal Christmas track was a rip off of a song they wrote in 1989, and therefore Carey - as well as her business partners and a co-writer on ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ - were liable for copyright infringement.
As the song-theft lawsuit went through the motions, the judge, Monica Ramirez Almadani, told both sides to submit motions for summary judgement specifically relating to the so called ‘extrinsic test’, which is employed by courts in California in copyright legal battles like this one.
Carey’s lawyers defined the ‘extrinsic test’ in one of their earlier legal filings. Under that test, they said, Vance and Powers must identify “concrete, objective similarities” between the two works.
The court would then consider if those similar elements are substantial enough to be protected by copyright law in isolation. If the court decides none of the similar elements enjoy copyright protection, then the song-theft lawsuit can be dismissed on summary judgement without going to trial.
In their motion for summary judgement, the Carey side said that the similarities identified by Vance and Powers were “an unprotectable jumble of elements”. The judge ultimately agreed that Vance and Powers’ claim failed the extrinsic test and dismissed the song-theft litigation.
However, in their motion for dismissal, Vance and Powers also presented arguments and evidence that went far beyond the extrinsic test, despite the clear instructions from Ramírez Almadani. This required the Carey side to do lots of extra work responding to those other arguments.
In her judgement last month, Ramírez Almadani strongly criticised Vance and Powers over this conduct. Despite her court’s “clear instructions”, she wrote, Vance and Powers, and their attorneys, “inexplicably moved for summary judgment on other elements of their copyright claim, ie ownership, copying and access”.
The Vance and Powers side, she added, then argued that “any reference to issues outside of the extrinsic test was ‘intended only as background’”. But, “this explanation strains credulity”, because their motion for summary judgment “devotes an entire section of the argument - not background - to the issues of ownership, copying and access”.
Vance, Powers and their lawyers had an opportunity to “remedy this misconduct”, the judge went on, but instead “delayed and needlessly caused defendants to oppose irrelevant factual and legal issues that are not properly before the court”.
“A reasonable attorney”, she concluded, “would not have blatantly disregarded” the court’s instructions and “raised frivolous legal arguments, and cited irrelevant and unsupported statements of fact”.
To that end, the judge sanctioned the Vance and Powers side, ordering them to pay “the amount of some or all attorneys’ fees incurred by defendants in preparing their opposition to plaintiffs’ motion”.
Which, Carey et al now say, means they should hand over a neat $186,000.