La-Deidre Matthews

Every litigant wants their attorneys’ fees, but actually recovering them in North Carolina is rare. Fee recovery must be authorized by rule or statute, and fees must be “reasonable.” Some of our prior posts dealt with statutory authorization and entitlement. Here, we skip over entitlement and focus on the proof, i.e., evidence parties submitted (or failed to submit) to prove reasonableness. As several recent Business Court rulings remind us, when it comes to proof of reasonableness, more is better.