A judge has ruled that Oberlin must pay the Gibson family $6.5 million in addition to the $25 million it already owes.
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Oberlin College’s legal and financial woes continue to grow as a result of Gibson’s Bakery’s lawsuit against it. Oberlin Students protested outside Gibson’s in 2016 in response to Gibson’s perceived overreaction to a shoplifting attempt by three African American students. This was just days after Donald Trump’s election. Tempers ran high and student protesters accused Gibson’s of racism. Gibson’s sued the college for libel and for intentional infliction of emotional distress.
As discussed in numerous previous posts, coverage of this case has been problematic. While some Oberlin College administrators acted poorly, media accounts made it sound as though administrators were handing out leaflets to passers-by and demanding that faculty let students out of classes to protest. To say that there has been a piling on regarding Oberlin would be an understatement.
The latest blow to the college occurred earlier this month when the judge hit Oberlin with $6.5 million dollars in attorney’s fees in addition to the $25 million dollars it already owes in compensatory and punitive damages.
As has been the case throughout the legal proceedings, Oberlin consistently got the short end of the stick anytime the court had discretion in deciding how much money the college will have to pay. The court allowed the assessment of fees to be based on “block-billing,” which is a practice that often inflates lawyers’ fees. The judge also awarded attorney’s fees even for work done on legal claims that the Gibson’s did not prevail on.
The fees were also increased by something called “a multiplier.” First, the judge calculates a “lodestar” figure by multiplying the number of hours reasonably worked by the attorneys by what the judge considers a reasonable hourly fee. The judge decided that the fee should be $290 per hour and that the plaintiffs’ attorneys worked for 14, 417 hours on the case. So, the court ruled: “Applying the above, Plaintiffs’ counsel’s reasonable hourly rate ($290.00 per hour) times the number of hours reasonably expended (14,417) equates to a lodestar amount of $4,180,930.”
That’s a lot of attorney’s fees and the Supreme Court has held that: “We have established a ‘strong presumption’ that the lodestar represents the ‘reasonable’ fee.” Nevertheless, the Ohio court decided that the complexity of the issues in the case justified a multiplier of 1.5, meaning that it increased the award of attorney’s fees by 50%. So, it multiplied the lodestar amount by 1.5, resulting in attorney’s fees of $6,271,395. The court added a shade under $300,000 in various litigation expenses to the award for a total of about $6.5 million. This is on top of the $25 million verdict of course, so Oberlin is getting walloped with $31.5 million in damages and obviously has to pay its own attorney’s fees as well.
Public opinion, as measured by media coverage and comments, has been overwhelmingly against Oberlin in this case. It has been consistently been seen as a morality tale about the excesses of political correctness and crying wolf about racism.
But his giant verdict is dangerous. A verdict of this size would put many colleges out of business. While there have been a lot of mentions of Oberlin’s large endowment, the college actually has real money problems. Also, while it draws students nationally, it is located in a part of the country that expects the number of high school graduates to shrink over the next few years. On top of all that, all the negative publicity surrounding this case could hamper its ability to bounce back financially.
While there is nothing wrong with people having sympathy for the Gibsons, the delight so many people have expressed with this verdict is misplaced. Economically wounding the college will only harm the town of Oberlin that, to a large degree, depends on it economically. Also, the verdict will place a great deal of pressure on colleges to control student and faculty speech. There has been a common claim that Oberlin faculty and administrators participated in the protests, but there does not seem to be any dispute that the words found libelous by the jury were written by students. Holding the college responsible for them is a recipe for censorship, with the prospect of huge verdicts hanging over the heads of colleges that fail to control their students.
This entire situation called for moderation. It obviously would have been better if the case could have been settled and each side blames the other for that not happening. But there has been little moderation in this case. Oberlin wasn’t just found to have acted poorly, it was found to have acted maliciously, resulting in huge punitive damages. Now “multiplied” attorney’s fees have been added on top of this. Hopefully, an appellate court will show some perspective and reduce this giant verdict. In terms of reining in the excesses of political correctness, surely the message has been heard loud and clear across the country. Moderation of the verdict in order to let Oberlin recover from this debacle would be the right thing to do.
