A federal judge awarded a Chicago church over $237,000 in attorney fees last week, ending nearly 10 years of litigation over parking between it and the city.
U.S. District Judge Mary M. Rowland in the Northern District of Illinois awarded the Immanuel Baptist Church a third of the $679,910.25 it initially asked for in its petition. She denied the church compensation for redundant and unnecessary work, which deducted over $442,000 in fees. Rowland based her decision to use the current market rate for the counsel’s fees on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit’s 2021 case of Vega v. Chicago Park District. She noted that the majority of the legal action occurred from 2022 to 2023 and culminated in a four-day bench trial in January 2023, despite the initial case being filed in 2017.