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WESCO INSURANCE COMPANY,
Plaintiff-Appellee,
v.
RODERICK LINTON BELFANCE, LLP, et al.,
Defendants,
JASON D. WALLACE; DANIEL R. BACHE,
Defendants-Appellants. |
No. 21-3479 |
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio at Cleveland.
No. 1:17-cv-01813—Benita Y. Pearson, District Judge.
Argued: January 13, 2022
Decided and Filed: July 1, 2022
Before: COLE, LARSEN, and MURPHY, Circuit Judges.
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OPINION
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MURPHY, Circuit Judge. If a court compels a lawyer to pay a defendant’s attorney’s
fees because the lawyer filed a frivolous complaint or litigated a case for an improper purpose,
would the average attorney describe this fees award as a “sanction”? This case raises that
interpretive question. And we have a large body of legal sources to help answer it: the thousands
of judicial decisions available on Westlaw or Lexis. They reveal that the legal community
routinely describes an attorney’s fees award as a “sanction” when a court grants it because of
abusive litigation tactics.
This fact dooms the request for insurance coverage by the two lawyers who filed this
appeal. These lawyers had brought claims against schools under the Individuals with Disabilities
Education Act (IDEA). After the claims failed, the schools sought their attorney’s fees from the
lawyers under the IDEA’s fee-shifting provision. The lawyers asked their insurer, Wesco
Insurance Company, to pay the fees. Wesco refused on the ground that the requested attorney’s
fees fell within the insurance policy’s exclusion for “sanctions.” Because the IDEA makes
attorney misconduct a prerequisite to a fees award against a party’s lawyer, we agree that this
policy exclusion applied. We thus affirm the summary-judgment ruling for Wesco. |
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