Background
The Town of Pawleys Island sought beach renourishment easements from coastal landowners beginning in February 2019. When negotiations with Sunset Lodge, LLC, Franklin D. Beattie (as trustee), and M. Baron Stanton (collectively, Landowners) broke down, the Town adopted a May 2020 resolution authorizing condemnation of the remaining easements. The Town then served condemnation notices that were overbroad in multiple respects: they sought easements exceeding the scope of the Town Council’s own resolution, described the interests differently than the appraisals, and purported to grant the Town “the right of public use and access” over the entirety of private lots. Compounding the problem, the Town—in violation of the applicable statute—failed to provide Landowners with the appraisal reports before serving the condemnation notices, and inexplicably rejected the alternative easement deeds Landowners prepared and tendered.
The Landowners filed separate actions challenging the condemnation. After voluminous motion practice, the circuit court granted summary judgment to Landowners, quashing all three condemnation notices. The circuit court found the Town had sought an easement of greater scope than authorized by Town Council, greater than appraised, while offering payment based on a still-different description—a pattern of inconsistency and municipal overreach the circuit court detailed at length. The Town’s Rule 59(e), SCRCP, motions were denied.
Landowners then petitioned for attorney’s fees under the Eminent Domain Procedure Act (EDPA), S.C. Code Ann. § 28-2-510 (2007), which mandates fee-shifting to landowners who successfully defeat a condemnation. After multiple amended affidavits, Landowners ultimately claimed $175,895 in fees based on approximately 950 attorney hours. The Town’s expert opined 125 hours was reasonable; its attorney said 127 hours. The circuit court accepted the 125-hour figure and awarded each Landowner only $8,913.33 in fees and costs—an 87% reduction from what was claimed. Landowners appealed the fee award.
The Court’s Holding
The Court of Appeals affirmed as modified, finding the circuit court had correctly concluded that 950 claimed hours was unreasonably excessive, but had abused its discretion by mechanically adopting the Town’s expert figure without accounting for the Town’s own conduct and without addressing the irreconcilable inconsistencies between the summary judgment order and the fee order.
Under EDPA § 28-2-510(A), when a court determines a condemnor had no right to take all or part of a landowner’s property, “the landowner’s reasonable costs and litigation expenses incurred therein must be awarded.” The court noted the statute’s fee-shifting mandate is non-discretionary as to entitlement, and that “litigation expenses” under § 28-2-30(14) expressly include reasonable attorney’s fees. Applying the six-factor framework from Jackson v. Speed, 326 S.C. 289, 486 S.E.2d 750 (1997)—nature and difficulty of the case; time necessarily devoted; professional standing of counsel; contingency of compensation; beneficial results obtained; and customary fees for similar services—the court found the Town’s troubling conduct (seeking easements beyond what its own resolution authorized, rejecting Landowners’ proposed easements without explanation, and blocking discovery before all claims could be considered on the merits) materially increased the attorney time necessarily devoted to these cases.
At the same time, the court agreed that the claimed hours were unreasonably excessive. Landowners’ counsel engaged in block billing, including entries claiming 19.8 hours in a single day and 6.1 hours to “receive and respond to emails.” Over a six-day stretch, counsel claimed between 8.1 and 11.7 hours per day. Such patterns warranted significant reduction. The court set 250 hours as the reasonable figure at $190 per hour, yielding a modified total attorney’s fee award of $47,500 and $913.33 in costs—roughly triple the circuit court’s award—to be shared equally among the appellant Landowners pursuant to their fee-sharing agreement.
Key Takeaways
- EDPA § 28-2-510 mandates fee-shifting to a successful condemnation challenger; the trial court has no discretion to deny fees, only to set the reasonable amount—and that amount must be grounded in specific findings on the six Jackson factors, not simply adopted from the condemnor’s expert.
- A circuit court abuses its discretion when it mechanically accepts the condemnor’s proposed reasonable-hours figure without accounting for the condemnor’s own conduct that increased the litigation burden on the prevailing landowners.
- Block billing—billing by the day rather than by task, claiming 19+ hours in a single entry, and vague descriptions like “receive and respond to emails” for 6+ hours—will significantly undercut a fee petition and invite judicial reduction of the entire time record.
- The condemnor’s good or bad conduct during the pre-litigation and litigation phases is a relevant consideration in calculating the “time necessarily devoted” factor under Jackson; a municipality that engages in overreach and discovery obstruction cannot then argue that minimal hours were all that was “reasonably necessary.”
Why It Matters
Sunset Lodge v. Town of Pawleys Island provides important guidance on EDPA attorney’s fee awards—a remedy that will become increasingly relevant as coastal and municipal condemnation activity continues in South Carolina. The decision clarifies two correctives that the Court of Appeals will apply when a fee award goes wrong: an award anchored solely to the condemnor’s expert without independent judicial analysis will be modified upward, and an award based on excessive or block-billed hours will be reduced. The practical result here—the court effectively setting the reasonable-hours figure at twice the condemnor’s 125-hour figure—signals that courts should take a balanced approach rather than defaulting to either the petitioner’s inflated total or the condemnor’s minimized estimate.
For landowners’ counsel in condemnation challenges, the decision underscores the importance of contemporaneous, task-specific billing records from the outset. The EDPA’s mandatory fee-shifting provision is only as valuable as the quality of the fee petition that supports it; block billing and unsupported time entries will cost clients a substantial portion of an otherwise available recovery. For municipalities and their counsel, the case confirms that unreasonable pre-litigation conduct—seeking overbroad easements, misrepresenting project necessity, rejecting reasonable alternatives without explanation, and blocking discovery—will be counted against the condemnor when the prevailing landowner’s reasonable hours are calculated. A town that behaves reasonably in the condemnation process will likely face a lower fee obligation than one whose overreach drives up the cost of the landowners’ defense.