I tell anyone who will listen: if you have a case in California court, make sure you are aware that attorneys' fees are available for proving the matters in requests for admission. So if you deny a request for admission and you lose on that issue at trial, you are liable for fees under Code of Civil Procedure section 2033.420 unless your denial was reasonable.
It sounds too good to be true. And for the prevailing plaintiff in Conrado v. CLS Landscaping Mgmt. (D4d1 Nov. 27, 2023 No. D081551) [nonpub. opn.], it was too good to be true. In this auto-accident case, the plaintiff asked the defendant to admit, in essence, every element of plaintiff’s case: that the driver was negligent, that the negligence caused the injury, and that the plaintiff was not comparatively at fault. Plaintiff obviously did not admit. But the defendant went on to prevail at trial.
The defendant then brought a motion under section 2033.420 to recover its costs-of-proof fees for proving the matters that it claimed the plaintiff should have admitted in the requests for admission. The defendant sought a whopping $1,056,250 in fees going back to the start of the entire case. The trial court thought the showing was a little vague, but awarded $500,000 based on “overall reasonableness.” The court also specifically said it was awarding fees “from the day the case was filed.”
That was error. Section 2033.420 is a reimbursement statute, not a penalty. So you can only get fees incurred after the responding party fails to admit the issue. After all, the responding party is powerless to prevent you from incurring fees on an issue before you have an opportunity to admit the matter.
In addition to the temporal error, the trial court also erred by failing to segregate compensable tasks. The prevailing party’s attorneys failed to distinguish between the fees incurred for proving the matters in the requests for admissions and fees incurred for proving other matters. The costs-of-proof statute is limited to fees incurred to prove the matter in the request. It does not authorize an award for any other fees.
The court remanded so that the trial court could redetermine the appropriate amount of section 2033.420 costs-of-proof fees.
My experience is only anecdotal, but I have seen an increase in section 2033.420 costs-of-proof fee cases. I have seen cases where the requests for admissions are limited to key issues. But I have seen other cases, like Conrado, where the party goes for the gusto and basically takes the CACI instructions on ultimate issues and turns them into requests for admissions. This strikes me as a misuse of the statute. The statute provides that fees are not allowed if the refusal to admit a request was for good reason, and in my view, there is presumptively good reason to refuse to admit that, in effect, your case ought to be dimissed.
Conrado correctly applied existing published authorities on the temporal and topical limitations to section 2033.420. But eventually a court needs to rein in the abuse of the statute by holding that ham-handed requests for admit all the ultimate issues in the case do not pass muster.
