Wage Law

When you are bolgging, typos are no big deel.

However, typos can be very expensive if you are seeking attorneys' fees in front of a jurist like U.S. District Judge J. William Ditter, Jr. Ruling upon a fee motion in which a successful plaintiff sought more than $180,000 in fees, the judge reduced the amount to $105,000 to account for claims dismissed before trial, then cut that amount by another 75 percent to account for claims rejected by the jury, and what he called “questionable time records, lack of candor and slip-shod submissions," citing spelling errors such as "plaintf," "Philadehia," "attoreys," "reasonbale" and "Ubited States"; a misquoted a federal statute; citing wrong court rules; and calling a U.S. Supreme Court dissenting opinion a concurring opinion. The judge noted that an amended petition had corrected most of the misspellings but still contained several errors, including the wrong first name for a police officer, errors in case and statute citations, missing words and “challenging” assertions; plus, the new version incorrectly listed the amount of damages awarded by the jury in the civil rights suit as $15,000 instead of $150,000. Bottom line: the fees were reduced from $180,000 to $26,000. The case is McKenna v. City of Philadelphia. How much of the $154,000 haircut resulted directly from the typos is unclear, but it is clear that the errors were a big part of the judge's motivation to slash the fees.