U.S. District Court for the NMI designated judge Frances M. Tydingco-Gatewood approved yesterday the CNMI agreement to pay $800,000 in attorney\u2019s fees and costs to Betty Johnson\u2019s original counsel, Bruce Jorgensen. <\/p>\n
In a separate order yesterday, Tydingco-Gatewood denied awarding fees to Johnson\u2019s other counsel, Timothy Lord. <\/p>\n
Tydingco-Gatewood said having considered the CNMI government\u2019s and Jorgensen\u2019s stipulated motion for approval of his fees, as well as all arguments and submissions, she finds the settlement agreement to be fair and reasonable.<\/p>\n
The judge said the settlement agreement was reached after the parties in Johnson\u2019s class action participated in extensive settlement discussions with Hawaii chief bankruptcy judge Robert J. Faris.<\/p>\n
With respect to Lord\u2019s petition for fees and costs, Tydingco-Gatewood finds that Lord has not shown that his work produced a concrete beneficial result for the class.<\/p>\n
Tydingco-Gatewoood, however, stated that she is disappointed that Jorgensen did not include the work performed by Lord or his paralegal in his original fee petition or in his settlement discussions with the CNMI government, especially since it was he who sought the assistance of Lord during the initial stages of this litigation.<\/p>\n
The judge said for reasons not completely clear to the court, Jorgensen and Lord parted ways on less than amicable terms.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause there was no agreement between Mr. Lord and Mr. Jorgensen with regard to the allocation of attorneys\u2019 fees if the plaintiff were to prevail, the court reviewed the record to evaluate the respective contributions of counsel to obtaining the benefit for the class,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Lord\u2019s initial demand for payment was either $3.6 million or $5.9 million. The CNMI government opposed granting fees to Lord. <\/p>\n
Tydingco-Gatewood had already approved the payment for Johnson\u2019s other counsels\u2014Bronster Hoshibata law firm in the amount of $6.5 million and Stephen Woodruff in the amount of $185,000.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
U.S. District Court for the NMI designated judge Frances M. Tydingco-Gatewood approved yesterday the CNMI…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[26,93],"class_list":["post-187009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-cnmi","tag-district-court"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187009\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}