You win your case, and the court finds that you are entitled to your reasonable attorney fees and costs from your opponent. You are excited that you are going to be reimbursed some or all of the fees and costs you have had to pay — but not so fast.  

Unless your opponent agrees with your attorney fee demand, you must go back to court for a determination of how much you would be entitled to as “reasonable fees.” Therefore, you would be required to incur more fees to litigate the amount, including to hire an expert and have an evidentiary hearing, which could be quite expensive in themselves. 

Further, under Florida law, while the fees for proving entitlement to fees are recoverable, your fees for determining the specific amount are not. You are now left wondering how much more you will have to  spend in unrecoverable attorney fees for this arduous task and envisioning your net recovery being reduced.

The Sixth District Court of Appeal of the State of Florida recently entered a ruling that would make substantive changes to this requirement and could make this process much more timely and financially efficient for litigants. 

For more than 60 years, the Florida appellate courts have held that a trial court cannot enter an award of attorney fees without first conducting an evidentiary hearing and receiving testimony from an expert witness regarding the reasonableness of the fees. That  long practice may have ended on March 20, when Florida’s relatively new Sixth District  Court of Appeal issued its opinion in Ruffenach v. Deutsche Bank National Trust Co.¹

The Sixth District held that “a trial court need not always conduct an evidentiary hearing or  receive expert testimony concerning the reasonableness of attorney’s fees before granting  an award of attorneys’ fees pursuant to a statute, rule, or contractual provision providing for  such an award.” The court has certified its decision to be in direct conflict with 37 decisions of its sister courts.  

In coming to this conclusion, the Sixth District reviewed the history of attorney fees in  Florida, initially noting that no statute or rule requires Florida courts to conduct an evidentiary hearing or receive expert testimony before granting an award of attorney fees pursuant to a statute, rule or contractual provision.  

Rather, the court identifies that the expert witness requirement was judicially created by the Second District Court of Appeal in 1964 in the case of Lyle v. Lyle without any legal authority cited in support of such requirement.²  After the Second District issued Lyle,  other district court decisions cited Lyle in adopting the proposition that expert testimony concerning the reasonableness of attorney fees is required to support any such award.³ 

The Sixth District further noted that with respect to the evidentiary hearing requirement,  the court could not find a specific origin of the requirement to hold an evidentiary hearing on a motion for attorney fees. However, this requirement would logically flow from the requirement to receive expert testimony as the trial courts must have an evidentiary hearing in order to hear expert testimony.  

Finally, the Sixth District noted that the Florida Supreme Court “has never held that expert  testimony and an evidentiary hearing are required for a trial court to grant an award of  attorneys’ fees and it has never held that they are not required.” There has only been discussion of these requirements in nonbinding dicta by the Florida Supreme Court.  

Following the Sixth District’s analysis of the history of attorney fees in Florida, the court conducted an analysis on whether a trial court must receive expert testimony and conduct an evidentiary hearing “according to first principles.”  

Under this analysis, the court notes that the only legal rationale offered to justify the expert witness requirement is that the award must be based on competent substantial evidence, and the self-serving nature of the testimony provided by the attorney who is seeking their fees precludes such testimony from meeting that test.  

The Sixth District rejected this rationale, stating that given the volume of fee hearings the  trial court conducts on a regular basis, “trial judges are themselves highly experienced in  attorneys’ fees and are experts on the reasonableness of attorneys’ fees, including the  proper amount of hours for attorneys to expend on particular tasks in litigation and the reasonable hourly rates for attorneys.”  

As for the evidentiary hearing requirement, the court noted that “the federal courts utilize  the same lodestar approach to attorneys’ fees and base their attorneys’ fees awards on  evidence in the form of affidavits, and yet federal courts routinely grant attorneys’ fees  awards without evidentiary hearings.”  

Analyzing federal court cases, the court concluded that “federal courts do not typically hold evidentiary hearings on attorneys’ fees because there are no material fact disputes to resolve at an evidentiary hearing when there are no factual disputes at all, or when the only factual disputes that exist concern matters on which the trial court itself is an expert” — in this case, the reasonableness of fees.  

Thus, the Sixth District held that “where there is no material factual dispute between the  parties concerning a request for attorneys’ fees other than whether the hourly rates of the  attorneys for whom fees are sought are reasonable and whether the number of hours  expended by those attorneys on particular litigation tasks were reasonable, trial courts are  not required to conduct an evidentiary hearing on a request for attorneys’ fees.”  

The Sixth District concluded by certifying a conflict for the Florida Supreme Court to resolve between this opinion and 37 other cases spanning the Second, Third, Fourth and Fifth District Courts of Appeal.  

A Florida Supreme Court affirmation of this decision would be a welcome change and would certainly make it more efficient in time and money for litigants.  

What should you do in the meantime if your case does not fall under the Sixth District and you are bound by the decisions of the conflicting district court of appeals rulings requiring expert testimony and evidentiary hearings? Preserve, preserve, preserve! You should clearly and specifically identify on the record the conflicting decision from the Sixth District, why you believe the Sixth District is correct, and state that the issue has been certified to the Florida Supreme Court to resolve the conflict.  

Make a record and assert your objections to ensure the issue is preserved for appellate review.  

[1] Ruffenach v. Deutsche Bank National Trust Company, et al., Case No. 6D2023-1482  (Fla. 6th DCA Mar. 20, 2026).  

[2] Lyle v. Lyle, 167 So. 2d 456 (Fla. 2d DCA 1964).  

[3] In the case of Lafferty v. Lafferty, the Second DCA partially receded from Lyle, holding that a trial court.

This article first appeared in Law360 on June 1, 2026, and is republished here with permission from the publication.