FRUCTUOUSO ZAVALA-ALVAREZ, Plaintiff, v. DARBAR MANAGEMENT, INC., IRFAN MOTEN, M. SALIM MOTEN, IMRAN MOTEN, SKAANZ ENTERPRISE, INC., and ASIF RANGOONWALA, Defendants Case No. 19 C 4041 United States District Court, N.D. Illinois, Eastern Division Filed: May 04, 2021 Fuentes, Gabriel A., United States Magistrate Judge SECOND SUPPLEMENTAL REPORT AND RECOMMENDATION This matter is before the magistrate judge on referral for discovery supervision. (D.E. 14). Before the Court is plaintiff's motion for attorney's fees and costs. (“the Motion” or “Mot.”; D.E. 110.) The Motion was filed after, on the magistrate judge's Report and Recommendation (D.E. 102), the district court granted plaintiff's motion for sanctions and entertained plaintiff's counsel's submission for attorney's fees and costs as a component of those sanctions imposed for the discovery misconduct (D.E. 106), as detailed in the Report and Recommendation. The magistrate judge advised the parties that he will make a recommendation to the district court concerning the Motion (D.E. 111), and the magistrate judge's recommendation is contained in this Second Supplemental Report and Recommendation. BACKGROUND The Court will not rehash the details of the discovery misconduct in this case by defendants Irfan Moten and Darbar Management, Inc. But it suffices to say that the Report and Recommendation, which was adopted in full by the district court, outlined a pattern of withholding and discarding responsive documents with full knowledge of the pendency of discovery requests calling for production of those documents, serving false interrogatory answers concerning what documents Irfan Moten and Darbar Management possessed and maintained, fabricating documents that these defendants then passed off as contemporaneously created time cards that plaintiff sought as standard discovery in wage-and-hour actions like this Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”) action, and offering false, sworn testimony designed to mislead plaintiff about the state of discovery that these defendants could or would provide. This discovery misconduct resulted in plaintiff having to pursue a fruitless motion to compel discovery (D.E. 32) and a motion for sanctions (D.E. 70), and to prepare for and conduct a sanctions motion evidentiary hearing. Plaintiff also had to submit post-hearing briefing in support of the sanctions motion. Plaintiff has presented an affidavit as to the extent and nature of counsel's efforts, along with the billing detail, and requests an award of $71,145 in fees and $1,991.28 in costs. Mot., Exh. A. In formulating this recommendation, the magistrate judge has considered the proposed rate of plaintiff's counsel, the work performed as outlined in the billing detail plaintiff provided, and the costs set forth by plaintiff. ANALYSIS AND RECOMMENDATION I. Proposed Rate Plaintiff's counsel, Timothy M. Nolan, has handled this matter as a sole practitioner, and he is the sole attorney whose time appears on the billing detail plaintiff provided in support of the Motion. Id. There are no associates, and no time entries describing associates having office conferences with each other or with partners about various strategic decisions or developments in the case. Rather, Mr. Nolan performed every task (for which plaintiff now seeks fees) himself. He argues for a rate of $450 per hour, a rate he says that at least two other district judges in this Court have accepted relatively recently in FLSA actions. Mot., Exh. A, Nolan Aff. ¶ 7, citing Perez v. Albany Restaurant, Inc., No. 19 C 4668 (Pallmeyer, C.J.), and Ramirez v. The Tequilla Corporation, No. 19 C 5654 (Kness, J.). The Court permitted defendants to respond to the Motion by March 26, 2021 (D.E. 112), but none of the defendants filed a response, and on or about March 16, 2021, defendant Irfan Moten is reported to have filed a Chapter 13 Voluntary Petition for Bankruptcy. (Plaintiff's Reply in Support of His Motion for Attorney's Fees and Costs (D.E. 121) ¶ 3.) No defendant has responded to or contested plaintiff's assertion that $450 an hour for counsel's services is a fair and just rate. Plaintiff has cited two matters in which judges of this Court have accepted that rate. The magistrate judge also is familiar prevailing rates of experienced attorneys in the Chicago community. Considering all of the foregoing, the magistrate judge finds the asserted $450-per-hour rate to be fair and just. II. Work Performed Next, the magistrate judge analyzed the work performed by plaintiff's counsel as set forth in the submission. Generally speaking, the time billing detail in Exhibit A to the motion is notable for how, overall, the time entries are relatively spartan. This Court has reviewed invoices in which attorneys spent seven to nine hours a day, for multiple days on end, drafting briefs and preparing for hearings. Mr. Nolan, however, managed to keep his research, drafting, and hearing preparation to a number of hours, sometimes in chunks of hours over consecutive days. Because of the challenges presented to him as set forth in the Report and Recommendation, his task of exacting from defendants the discovery he sought, analyzing it for deficiencies, moving to compel, and then uncovering the pattern of misconduct he skillfully exposed at the sanctions hearing (and in the briefing) was not simple or easy. The magistrate judge analyzed his billing detail during the Local Rule 37.2 conferral process (including the drafting of discovery correspondence and the review of the insufficient discovery he received); the preparation, filing and litigation of motions to compel and for sanctions; and preparing for and conducting the sanctions hearings (held over two days in open court by video), along with post-hearing briefing, and finds his requested fees in all of these respects to be eminently reasonable and not excessive. In only three areas does the magistrate judge recommend paring back plaintiff's fee request. First, plaintiff seeks fees for multiple one-tenth hour entries for receiving and reviewing the Court's orders scheduling hearings or other matters. The magistrate considers these kinds of orders, even though they related to scheduling matters bound up with issues related to the discovery misconduct, as part of the ordinary course of any litigation, and had the discovery misconduct not occurred, the Court likely would have been entering scheduling orders on other, more routine matters. The one-tenth hour billings for those tasks on 1/13/20, 6/11/20, 6/17/20, 7/10/20, 7/14/20, 7/30/20, 7/31/20, and 8/14/20 add up to 0.8 hours, by which the magistrate judge recommends reducing the fee portion of the award. Second, plaintiff seeks fees for litigation of a summary judgment motion that defendants withdrew shortly after Irfan Moten's March 2020 discovery deposition. (D.E. 52.) The motion had to do with defendants' alleged “enterprise” liability issue under the FLSA, based on Darbar's revenues, an issue on which plaintiff sought discovery and encountered the same pattern of resistance from defendants Irfan Moten and Darbar Management when it came to sales tax returns, bank account records, and other information about Darbar's revenues. Plaintiff has a colorable argument for inclusion of the summary judgment litigation into the efforts he and his counsel had to take as a result of the sanctioned conduct here, but (1) defendants did withdraw the motion, and (2) responding to the motion was not at the core of what plaintiff had to undertake specifically as a result of the discovery misconduct outlined in the Report and Recommendation. The time entries for the summary judgment work were on 1/15/20, 1/16/20, 1/22/20, 3/6/20, 3/25/20, 3/26/20, and 3/27/20, and the billing for this work adds up to 2.6 hours, by which the magistrate judge recommends reducing the fee portion of the award. Third, plaintiff's counsel prepared for and took the deposition of Irfan Moten on March 4, 2020. The Report and Recommendation detailed various falsehoods in Mr. Moten's testimony in that deposition. This was a deposition that plaintiff needed to take, with or without the discovery misconduct of Mr. Moten and Darbar Management, and at first glance, the Court considered excluding it entirely from the fee award for that reason. But Mr. Moten's false testimony at that deposition played a central role in misleading plaintiff about the state of discovery available from defendants. The deposition was such a central part of defendants' discovery misconduct that that magistrate judge could not justify excluding all of it from the fee sanction award. Accordingly, the magistrate judge examined the deposition-related time entries from 2/28/20, 2/29/20, 3/1/20, 2/2/20, 3/3/20 and 3/4/20 and recommends that the district court include half of the fees from that work in the fee sanction award. The work for those dates added up to 17.7 hours; the magistrate judge recommends reducing the fee portion of the award by 8.85 hours. The total hours recommended for reduction are 12.25. Multiplied by $450 per hour, that reduction comes out to $5,512.50. III. Costs Plaintiff's request for costs, set forth in Exhibit A to the Motion and the attached invoices and receipts, is even more spartan than the attorney time billing. Plaintiff's requested costs include only (1) the printing and copying of exhibits, and the court reporting charge, for the March 2020 Moten deposition; (2) copying costs for the unmarked and marked exhibits used at the sanctions evidentiary hearing; and (3) the preparation of the court transcript of the evidentiary hearing. For the same reason the magistrate judge is reducing the fee award to reflect half of the fees associated with the Moten deposition, the magistrate judge recommends that the requested costs be reduced only by half of the costs reflected in (1) above, which total $932.45. The recommended reduction in costs to be awarded is thus $466.23. CONCLUSION For the foregoing reasons, the magistrate judge recommends that the district court partially grant the Motion by reducing the requested $71,145 in fees by $5,512.50 to $65,632.50, and by reducing the requested $1,991.28 in costs by $466.23 to $1,525.05. SO ORDERED. ENTER: