Tuesday, July 14, 2026
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Ninth Circuit:
Error to Deny ADA Party Fees Due to Injunctive-Only Relief
Opinion Says Judge Misread Case Law to Find That Serial California Plaintiff Did Not ‘Prevail’ Because Default Judgment Simply Required Fontana Store to Comply With Existing Law
By Kimber Cooley, associate editor
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held yesterday that a judge erred in denying attorney fees to a serial litigant of federal disability-access claims in California based on a finding that she does not qualify as a “prevailing plaintiff” under the statutory scheme where the only relief she obtained came by way of a default judgment that requires the retailer to bring itself into compliance with existing law.
Yesterday’s opinion, authored by Circuit Judge Daniel Aaron Bress and joined in by Circuit Judge Jacqueline Nguyen and Fifth U.S. Circuit Judge Stephen A. Higginson, sitting by designation, declares:
“In the abstract, a party is always bound to comply with the law. But an injunction forces the defendant to conform its behavior to the law in concrete ways that benefit the plaintiff, backed by a court order….The district court’s logic could be used to find that any permanent injunctive relief does not confer prevailing party status, since injunctions are, by definition, based on preexisting legal obligations.”
ADA Claims
Plaintiff Lasandra Price sought the fees after judgment was entered in her favor in October 2023 as to a complaint asserting claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”), codified at 42 U.S.C. §12101, against the Family Dollar store in Fontana, located in San Bernardino County, and its owner, Wael Diab.
District Court Judge John W. Holcomb of the Central District of California ordered the defendants to provide, within 180 days of the judgment, “accessible paths of travel from the designated disabled parking spaces to the business entrance, accessible parking spaces, compliant signage regarding parking, and an accessible business entrance at the property located at 8933 Sierra Avenue…in compliance with ADA Accessibility Guidelines.”
A few weeks later, lawyers with the Los Angeles-based The Law Office of Hakimi & Shahriari filed a motion for attorney fees and costs on Price’s behalf, seeking $9,364 in total for an asserted 31.2 hours of work. Holcomb denied the request in January 2025, saying:
“[T]he relief that [the plaintiff] received by way of her default judgment in this case…does not require Defendants to do anything that they are not already required to do under federal law. Therefore,…the Court concludes that [she] is not the prevailing party in this action….”
Recycled Motion
Holcomb also took issue with the motion itself, saying that “the Court notes that Price’s counsel appears to have recycled the instant Motion nearly whole-cloth from another recent case that they filed under the ADA” and had failed to “even expend the effort to replace” the pronouns from male to female ones, “to scan for simple copy-paste errors, or to amend the language of the Motion to reflect the procedural history of this case.” He concluded:
“[E]ven if Price’s counsel were entitled to an award of fees and costs—which they are not—they would not be entitled to the unreasonable amount that they request.”
Between 2021 and 2023, Price, while represented by attorneys with Hakimi & Shahriari, filed at least 17 other ADA actions against California defendants.
Bress acknowledged that “[u]nder the ADA, a ‘prevailing party’ may recover ‘a reasonable attorney’s fee’ ” and pointed out that the U.S. Supreme Court has held that a plaintiff is deemed to have “prevailed” when the relief obtained alters the legal relationship of the parties by requiring the defendant to change its behavior in a way that directly benefits the other party.
Injunctive Relief
Saying that “the Supreme Court has ‘repeatedly held that an injunction or declaratory judgment, like a damages award, will usually satisfy that test,’ ” he remarked that Holcomb’s ruling was “based on an apparent misunderstanding” of the Ninth Circuit’s 2000 decision in Fischer v. SJB-P.D. Inc.
In that case, the court reversed an order denying fees to a blind plaintiff who secured a settlement requiring the defendant to post a statement describing its policy of nondiscrimination, explaining that the Supreme Court test is met when a plaintiff becomes entitled to enforce a settlement or judgment against the defendant and declaring:
“In these situations, the legal relationship is altered because the plaintiff can force the defendant to do something he otherwise would not have to do.”
Bress said:
“The district court appears to have read this last sentence in Fischer to mean that because the defendants were already required to adhere to the ADA, final injunctive relief requiring compliance with the law did not make the plaintiff a prevailing party….But in context, this sentence in our Fischer opinion refers to the preceding one, in which we discussed how a plaintiff becomes a prevailing party when ‘entitled to enforce a judgment, consent decree, or settlement against the defendant.’ ”
As to Holcomb’s suggestion that the relief Price obtained was merely a “technical victory,” Bress responded by pointing to jurisprudence establishing that a default judgment is “on the merits” such that the party who obtains one qualifies as a “prevailing party.
He declined to rule on the amount of fees to which Price is entitled, saying that “we leave that determination for the district court in the first instance.” However, he added “a brief observation” on the plaintiff’s assertion that the errors Holcomb identified in the motion were “irrelevant editing mistakes that would have required additional billable time to address.”
The jurist commented:
“It should go without saying that the issues the district court identified…reflect a lack of diligence. Sound lawyering (of course) includes making sure that the fee motion papers pertain to the case at issue. Courts consider the ‘[q]uality of representation’ when determining a reasonable fee award….And we have affirmed that in ‘[an]…ADA case with boilerplate pleadings, minimal legal complexity, and little in the way of difficult fact discovery,’ a reduction in fees can be justified, particularly when the case involves a ‘serial’ plaintiff and a ‘lack of meaningful opposition’ by the defendant.”
The case is Price v. Diab, 25-713.
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