Podcast Episode: Ninth Circuit Awards Attorney Fees After Defendants Proceed on Void Ab Initio Ca

Pip: When a case turns out to have been void from the start, you might think everyone involved would quietly pack up and go home. Apparently not.

Mara: LauraLynnHammett documents exactly that scenario — a federal case that lacked subject-matter jurisdiction from day one, and what happened when the winning side still pushed for attorney fees against the pro se plaintiff who tried to fix the problem.

Pip: Let's get into the jurisdictional wreckage.

Ninth Circuit Fees on a Void Case

Mara: The core tension here is whether a court should exercise its discretion to award attorney fees against a pro se litigant who repeatedly tried to identify and correct the very defects that ultimately doomed the case.

Pip: The motion lays out the equitable argument directly. The filing states: "Because the litigation proceeded despite threshold jurisdictional defects, because Plaintiff acted in good faith to correct procedural errors once they became apparent, and because the record does not support several of the factual assertions advanced in support of the present motion, equity weighs heavily against any substantial fee award."

Mara: What that means in practice is that the plaintiff is arguing the fee-shifting purpose — deterring abusive litigation — runs exactly backward here. She's the one who voluntarily dismissed the defective claims. The Attorney Defendants are the ones who ran up six figures in fees on a case that lacked jurisdiction.

Pip: The jurisdictional defect itself is worth pausing on. The plaintiff filed in federal court naming an LLC as a defendant without knowing that an LLC shares citizenship with every one of its members. She was also a member. Diversity jurisdiction evaporated the moment the complaint was filed.

Mara: And the derivative malpractice claim against the Attorney Defendants was void ab initio for a separate reason — a non-attorney cannot prosecute a derivative claim on behalf of an LLC. The motion notes that the plaintiff moved for leave to retain limited-scope counsel specifically to sort out the derivative versus direct claim distinction, and that request was denied.

Pip: So the court denied the tool that might have fixed the problem, and now the same side wants fees because the problem wasn't fixed. That is a tidy little circle.

Mara: The motion also directly challenges the factual narrative in the fee request. The Attorney Defendants characterize the voluntary dismissal as a response to the anti-SLAPP motion. The plaintiff's own contemporaneous Notice of Voluntary Dismissal says otherwise — she dismissed because she recognized the derivative claim was a legal nullity, not because of the anti-SLAPP filing.

Pip: There's also a line-item dispute. Defense counsel billed at four hundred fifty dollars an hour, including for a motion the filing describes as substantially identical to a parallel fee motion filed the same day in a related appeal.

Mara: The motion's ask is precise: if any award is appropriate at all, it should be one dollar — enough to acknowledge the court's authority without producing what the filing calls a manifestly inequitable result.

Mara: The jurisdictional question here doesn't stay abstract for long — it connects directly to what courts owe litigants who are navigating complex rules without counsel.

Pip: A case void from inception, a denied request for limited help, and a six-figure fee demand at the end of it. The equitable argument writes itself.

Mara: The discretion question is the one to watch — how courts calibrate fee-shifting when the procedural failures weren't all on one side.