Case Update (6 Nov 2025): Bayerlein v. Anderson; Attorney Fee Award Slashed in Hague Abduction Case
The Petitioner in this case sought reimbursement of her legal fees and costs in the Hague Abduction Convention case in which she prevailed. The parties are parents to one child - a five-year-old daughter. The Respondent had brought the child to the United States by agreement. The agreement was for the child to remain in the United States until no later than December 31, 2025, but after several weeks in the USA, the child, then age 4, made some comment to the Petitioner about her home being in the USA, and the Petitioner changed her mind in allowing the child to remain in the USA (even until the original December date), and filed this Hague Abduction Convention petition. The court ultimately concluded the child must be returned to Germany, but in reviewing the Petitioner’s request for fees and costs in the amount of $26,440.43, the court decided to cut the award to only 10% of the total requested.
Pursuant to the U.S. implementing statute, the prevailing petitioner is entitled to necessary expenses, unless the Respondent establishes that it would be “clearly inappropriate.” Past caselaw fleshes out situations of where it would be clearly inappropriate to award fees, such as: when there was reasonable basis for removing the child, forum-shopping, the petitioner bears responsibility for the circumstances, the respondent’s inability to pay a fee award, and deterring such conduct in the first place. Therefore, fee awards are typically found to be appropriate, although usually, in applying the lodestar method of calculating the total due, the court scrutinizes the narratives on the attorney fee bills, the value behind certain costs (such as flying two lawyers across the country for a motion hearing), and whether the firm’s hourly rates were in line with past fee awards in similar cases.
In this case, the court reduced the fee award significantly, noting that the situation of this family “was a far cry from the kidnapping kind of cases the Court has seen before.” The court noted that it found the Respondent credible, and the Petitioner less so, and that the Respondent reasonably believed that the child was to be in his custody for the immediately foreseeable future. He relied on that, having quit his job in Germany to move to the USA, and it was upon the words of a four-year-old that the Petitioner changed her mind “with no regard for [Respondent’s] reliance interest, only weeks after [the child] arrived in the United States.” “The Court believes she was suffering buyer’s remorse about the custody arrangement to which she agreed, and instead of working with [Respondent] to come up with a plan to resolve the matter, she yanked him into court through this action.” In other words, the court found the Petitioner turned a routine custody matter into this unnecessary Hague action, which warranted a reduction in her fee award.
Separately for Hague counsel who seek fees in the United States, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois included a footnote stating that $400/hour is “excessive.” Compare that to a recent case in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York where lead counsel, an experienced Hague litigator, was found to have a reasonable rate at $750/hour (Satchel v. Satchel).
