In Kinney v. Corona, published January 24, 2024, the Fourth District Court of Appeal, Division 2 affirmed in part and reversed in part a trial court's decision awarding a California Public Records Act requestor attorney fees. The plaintiff sent a CPRA request to the defendant city, asking it to provide the name of the owner of a vehicle reported stolen. The city denied the request on the ground that the owner's name was confidential. The requestor then petitioned the superior court for declaratory relief and a writ of mandate ordering the city to disclose the name. After the petition was served, the city became aware that the plaintiff and her attorney at the time had filed more than a dozen CPRA requests against public entities in California. An attorney for the city believed that the plaintiff and her attorney were engaged in a "shakedown scheme" of finding news articles reporting crimes, requesting the name of the crime victim, and then petitioning the court and seeking fees when the agency declined to provide the information. Shortly afterward, the city served a Code of Civil Procedure section 998 offer on the plaintiff, offering to disclose the name, have judgment entered against the city, and pay the plaintiff $2,500 in costs and attorney fees. It was not accepted. A week later, the city disclosed the name to another CPRA requestor. The attorney who represented the second requestor then substituted into the plaintiff's case as the plaintiff's attorney. The new attorney served a request for admission concerning the service of the name to the second CPRA requestor. The city's attorney discovered that the new attorney for the plaintiff had filed nearly 100 CPRA lawsuits during the previous year, mostly on behalf of the second requestor. He believed all were complicit in a "shakedown scheme." The city asserted that the plaintiff's petition was moot because the city had disclosed the name to the second requestor, and the same attorney represented both. The trial court ordered the city to disclose the name to the plaintiff. The court then granted the plaintiff's motion for attorney fees. It ruled that the city's section 998 offer was too ambiguous to be enforced, because it did not specify the person to whom the name would be disclosed. The court awarded the plaitniff $43,300 in fees.
The appellate court affirmed the order awarding the plaintiff fees. Substantial evidence supports the trial court's decision that the plaintiff prevailed and that her lawsuit was the catalyst in the city providing her with the information. Because the city's attorney refused to produce the name to the plaintiff, believing there was a "shakedown scheme," evidence supported the finding that the city would not have produced the name directly to plaintiff without the lawsuit. The court rejected the city's argument that producing the information to another requestor represented by the same attorney was imputed notice to the plaintiff; while information given to an attorney is imputed to the client, information given to one client of an attorney is not imputed to another. But the appellate court reversed the trial court's finding that the section 998 offer was ambiguous. The language was not ambiguous, and the trial court based its ruling on the events that occurred after the offer was served--the city's production of the information to the second requestor and the city's argument that disclosure to the second requestor was disclosure to the plaintiff. The appellate court ordered the plaintiff's recovery of fees limited to her pre-offer attorney fees of $2,475.
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