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Federal Practice Manual for Legal Aid Attorneys: 9.2.1 Judgments

Judgments may be entered on the basis of litigated decisions,4376 by agreement, or by some combination of the two. For example, courts commonly decide whether defendants violated a legal duty to plaintiffs and urge the parties to agree on a remedial order. In the absence of agreement, both parties may submit their proposed orders. The remedial order itself may also be partially agreed upon and partially litigated, with unresolved issues submitted to the court for determination.

Federal Practice Manual for Legal Aid Attorneys: 1.4.5 Organizing Factual Information

Organization of the facts and the file should begin as soon as you know that you will commence litigation. Your system should be flexible enough to accommodate growth of the file. The particular way that you organize your file will depend on its potential size, the type of case, your personal style, and your program’s use of computer case management tools.

Federal Practice Manual for Legal Aid Attorneys: 9.2.4 Private Settlements

A settlement whose terms are not incorporated into a decree entered by the court stands on a very different legal footing from a consent decree. Most commonly, when cases are resolved by such an agreement, the parties terminate the litigation by a stipulation of dismissal which may or may not refer to the agreement. In Kokkonen v.

Federal Practice Manual for Legal Aid Attorneys: 9.2.20 Attorney’s Fees

While obtaining a consent decree should be sufficient in itself to justify plaintiffs’ entitlement to fees, other forms of settlement may be more problematic after Buckhannon.4442 Obtaining an agreement that plaintiffs are the prevailing party and entitled to specified fees is often possible and should be pursued. Such an agreement will likely avoid litigation over the issue and establish the right to a fee award.

Federal Practice Manual for Legal Aid Attorneys: 9.4.23 Taxation of Attorneys’ Fees

In Comm’r of Internal Revenue v. Banks, the Court held that “as a general rule, when a litigant's recovery constitutes income, the litigant's income includes the portion of the recovery paid to the attorney as a contingent fee.”4674 The Court in Banks did not rule on the question most legal aid and public interest attorneys confront, where fees are received through a fee-shifting statute, such as § 1988.