Royal Caribbean Owes $1 Million in Legal Fees in Job Bias Case

An opera singer who accepted Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd.‘s $300,000 offer of judgment to end his disability bias lawsuit is entitled to more than $1 million in attorneys’ fees and legal costs, a Miami federal judge ruled.

The $971,842 in fees the company must pay is less than half the $2.1 million Samuel Schultz’s lawyers sought in the Americans with Disabilities Act case, the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida said. A 30% reduction in the more than 4,000 hours Schultz’s counsel spent on the case was appropriate because the suit ended prior to trial and involved just one plaintiff. Royal Caribbean also isn’t required to foot the bill for Schultz’s decision to hire high-priced New York lawyers, the court said.

Schultz had every right to hire “the best possible employment lawyers,” Magistrate Judge Edwin G. Torres said. But the fee-shifting provisions requiring the company to pay Schultz prevailing party attorneys’ fees only entitle him to a “reasonable fee,” the judge said.

One of the New York lawyers, for example, was “a highly regarded civil rights attorney who rose to prominence as a leader of the ACLU in the 1970s,” the court said. Schultz sought an hourly rate of $975 for her work, but “nothing in the record” suggested that he could only hire someone of her stature or that he “needed to hire lawyers from New York at all,” the court said.

There were many competent attorneys in Miami who could have litigated the case “without charging New York rates,” Torres said. He rejected Schultz’s attempted reliance on Prison Legal News Inc. v. Inch, where former US Solicitor General Paul D. Clement was awarded a $900 hourly rate.

Prison Legal News “is an outlier,” the judge said, reducing the rates of all nine attorneys and the support staff who represented Schultz, including his Florida-based lawyers.

The 30% “across-the-board” reduction in the hours billed was required because the records showed excessive time for certain tasks, work done by more senior lawyers that could’ve been handled by more junior attorneys or paralegals, and duplicative work, the court said. The records were “too voluminous” to undertake an “hour-by-hour” adjustment, it said.

The court awarded Schultz the entire $76,804 in litigation costs he sought.

Outten & Golden LLP, Scott Wagner & Associates PA , and Leon Friedman of New York represented Schultz. Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart PC represented Royal Caribbean.

The case is Schultz v. Royal Caribbean Cruises, Ltd., S.D. Fla., No. 1:18-cv-24023, 9/30/22.