This program offers 1 participatory MCLE credit.

Presented by the Business Law Section and the Litigation Section.

This webinar will go over tips for litigating attorney fee motions in business litigation, focusing on contractual attorneys’ fees and Civil Code section 1717.

Speakers: Hon. Elizabeth Feffer and Richard Pearl

Moderator: Jordanna Thigpen

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Judge Elizabeth Feffer served on the Los Angeles Superior Court for 13 years before entering into alternative dispute resolution and serving as a private judge. Judge Feffer presided over more than 75 civil jury trials, more than 500 civil bench trials, hundreds of evidentiary hearings, and numerous settlement conferences, with a diverse range of complex factual and legal issues. Judge Feffer specializes in conducting mediations, arbitrations, discovery references, and private trials with ADR Services, Inc. Prior to her appointment to the bench, Judge Feffer served as a partner and trial lawyer litigating civil actions in state and federal court, on behalf of both plaintiffs and defendants.

Richard M. Pearl is a 1969 graduate of Boalt Hall School of Law (now Berkeley Law), University of California, Berkeley, California.  He spent his first 14 years as a Legal Services attorney,  ultimately serving as the Director of Litigation for California Rural Legal Assistance. Since 1983, he has been in private practice, with an increasingly specialized emphasis on court-awarded attorneys’ fees. He is the author of California Attorney Fee Awards (3d ed. Cal. CEB 2010) and all its previous editions and subsequent annual supplements.  His reported cases include: Flannery v. Prentice, 26 Cal. 4th 572 (2001), which held that in the absence of an agreement to the contrary, statutory attorneys’ fees belong to the attorney whose services they are based upon; Graham v. DaimlerChryslerCorp.,34 Cal. 4th 553 (2004), which held, inter alia, that the catalyst theory of fee recovery remained valid under California law and that lodestar multipliers could be applied to fee motion work;   and Davis v. City & County of San Francisco,976 F.2d 1536 (9th Cir. 1992), vacated in part on denial of reh’g, 976 F. 2d 1536 (9^th Cir. 1992). Mr. Pearl’s office is in Berkeley, California.