https://www.lozanosmith.com/news/cnb/CNB052015.pdf
In determining whether a petitioner is prevailing party in a CPRA lawsuit, entitling the petitioner to reasonable attorney fees and costs, a court must find that the litigation caused the public entity to release a previously withheld document. [Galbiso v. Orosi Public Utility Dist. (2008) 167 Cal.App.4th 1063, 1088.] A petitioner is considered a “prevailing party” if his suit motivated defendants to provide the primary relief sought or activated them to modify their behavior, or if litigation substantially contributed to the process which eventually achieved the desired result. [Belth v. Garamendi (1991) 232 Cal.App.3d 896, 901-902.]
If, on the other hand, a court finds a petitioner’s case is clearly frivolous, it must award court costs and reasonable attorney fees to the public agency. [Govt. Code § 6259(d).] In Butt v. City of Richmond (1996) 44 Cal.App.4th 925, a case very similar to Crews, the petitioner made a CPRA request to the City of Richmond and then filed a petition to force disclosure, even before the City could respond within the CPRA’s 10 day time period. While litigation proceeded, the City provided all records deemed disclosable under the CPRA and made extraordinary efforts to accommodate Butt’s specific requests. The court denied Butt’s petition because he failed to give the City 10 days to initially respond to his request, and also awarded the City’s attorneys’ fees costs against him for filing the frivolous lawsuit.
The trial court in Crews found that the District properly withheld 3,200 pages of documents subject to legal exemptions, and that only 91 pages of attachments to emails were inadvertently left out of the District’s production. Crews claimed that he should still be found to be the prevailing party, entitling him to reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs, arguing that the District produced thousands of pages of documents only after he filed his lawsuit. However, the court held that Crews’ frivolously pursued his lawsuit and that the documents produced by the District would have been produced without the lawsuit, thereby warranting sanctions against him for $56,595 in attorney fees and costs.