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Notes -
The lawyer thing wouldn't make sense anyway considering the volume of complaints and the suggestion in the article that so few of them had any merit. Fee awards in these kinds of cases (assuming OCR even has the authority to award them) are directly tied to the amount billed in the case, and possibly knocked down if the court finds they aren't reasonable. If a firm screens its cases carefully then it can get away with losing a few and effectively working for free on them since they're by definition making a profit on every hour billed, but filing thousands of complaints in a year suggests that the effort it takes to file them is minimal, and if the effort is minimal, so are the fees. If a firm can reasonably expect to collect 5k in fees for each successful case and it files 5,000 cases in a year then they need to win a lot of cases to justify laying out 25 million in billables up front. Most of the practice areas that make hay on statutory entitlement to fee awards are in areas where it's usually pretty clear that they're going to win. For example, I used to occasionally do Fair Credit Reporting Act and Fair Debt Collections Act stuff, and if a client comes to you with evidence of a violation, you can usually get a quick settlement because they know they'll lose in court and can at least save their own attorney's fees. If I have cell phone records showing that a debt collector called a client outside of the mandated hours, or at a frequency that's well within the unreasonable range, or something similar, then I could usually get a thousand bucks for the client and three grand in fees for a couple days worth of work. But that's because the debt collector doesn't have a defense and usually knows it. If these were tossups my usual rate is halved and if they're real crapshoots then I'm getting peanuts and it's unsustainable. This is obviously different from big personal injury cases where hundreds of thousands of dollars are involved and you only have to hit every once in a while to make your contingency fee worth it.
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