NICHOLAS SAFFOS v. AVAYA INC., ET AL. A-3189-08T2
Defendants urged that the trial judge erred by refusing to vacate the jury's punitive-damage award or, alternatively, by failing to remit that amount to a sum equal to the compensatory damages. Plaintiff cross-appealed the remittitur of the punitive-damage award to five times the compensatory award. We found no abuse of discretion in the remittitur of the $10 million punitive-damage award or the use of a multiplier of five times the compensatory damages as allowed by the Law Against Discrimination (LAD), N.J.S.A. 10:5-3, and the Punitive Damages Act (PDA), N.J.S.A. 2A:15-5.14(b). However, we concluded thatthe award of $250,000 for emotional distress damages should be excluded from the multiplier on substantive due process grounds because plaintiff suffered no physical consequences from the distress caused by the discrimination and the loss of his job and did not seek medical or psychological treatment, creating the inference that the large award for emotional-distress damages contained some punitive component, as recognized by the United States Supreme Court in State Farm Mut. Auto. Ins. Co. v. Campbell, 538 U.S. 408, 426, 123 S. Ct. 1513, 1525, 155 L. Ed. 2d 585, 606-07 (2003).
With respect to the award of attorney's fees, we excluded hours from the lodestar that were devoted to an unsuccessful motion to bar defense counsel from representing Avaya because the hours were not a productive use of time, Rendine v. Pantzer, 141 N.J. 292, 335 (1995), but otherwise affirmed the amount of the lodestar. Finally, we determined that plaintiff's counsel was not entitled to a contingency-fee enhancement because counsel's retainer agreement provided for an hourly fee of $325 plus a 100% fee enhancement, or one-third of the amount recovered, whichever was higher. In this case, the alternative fees provided by the retainer agreement in excess of the lodestar make an additional twenty-five-percent contingency-fee enhancement inconsistent with the purposes served by such enhancements under Rendine. 3-08-11
