After losing lawsuit, Richland County must pay more than $70K to other side’s lawyers
Richland County is on the hook to pay more than $70,000 to the attorneys who took the county to court and won.
The county was ordered Wednesday to pay the law firm of Columbia attorney Joe McCulloch $71,045.95 in attorneys fees, plus costs in the amount of $2,475.95. That comes on top of payments to the county’s own attorneys for defending the county council’s decision in the case.
Richland County had fought the request to have the county pay the fees, after it lost a case last year that vacated the nearly $1 million payout Richland County Council had approved for former administrator Gerald Seals.
A judge struck down the council’s vote for that payout after ruling that council members violated open-meeting rules in how it decided on the high-figure settlement to get the county’s top administrator to resign, weeks after the council had tried to fire Seals.
As the losing party, Richland County was liable to pay the winning attorney’s fees. McCulloch had represented county resident William Coggins in bringing the suit challenging the Seals payout.
The county had argued the plaintiff missed a moving deadline to ask to have attorney fees covered. Judge Jocelyn Newman rejected that argument on Wednesday, noting the deadline was pushed back by various procedural motions after her October 2020 ruling. Coggins beat the final deadline after her last order in the case by two days, Newman said.
The judge did side with Richland County in ruling McCulloch is only entitled to fees related to his prevailing argument that the county violated the S.C. Freedom of Information Act, and not fees related to his argument alleging ethical violations by council members, which Newman did not rule on.
But Newman did decide how much money the county is liable for, ruling McCulloch and other attorneys spent more than 181 billable hours working on the case, or more than 7.5 full days.
“Therefore, the Court finds that the attorneys’ fees and costs requested by Plaintiff to be reasonable and appropriate, despite the overlapping of certain FOIA-related and non-FOIA-related activities, as the Court accepts Plaintiff’s argument that many are inextricable one from the other,” the court ordered.
This story was originally published November 11, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
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