LaSandra Price has Parkinson’s disease and uses a wheelchair for mobility. Between August and September 2021, she visited a Family Dollar store in Fontana, California, owned by Wael Diab, on four occasions and encountered accessibility barriers each time, including poorly marked disabled parking spaces, uneven walkways, and aisles that were too narrow. Price sued Diab and the store under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act, Cal. Civ. Code § 51. (The district court separately declined supplemental jurisdiction over the Unruh Act claim after finding Price to be a “high-frequency litigant,” a ruling not at issue on appeal.) Neither Diab nor the store responded to the complaint, and the clerk entered defaults against both.
Price moved for default judgment and a specific injunction requiring accessible paths of travel, accessible parking spaces, compliant signage, and an accessible entrance within 180 days. The district court granted the motion, observing that Price’s proposed order was, if anything, narrower than what her complaint had sought, and entered the injunction essentially as requested. Price then moved for $9,364 in attorney’s fees and costs ($8,872 for 31.2 hours of work, plus $492 in costs) under the ADA’s fee-shifting provision, 42 U.S.C. § 12205, supporting the motion with billing records, a declaration from counsel, and a third-party survey of prevailing rates.
The district court denied Price’s fee motion in full, holding she was not a “prevailing party” under section 12205 because the injunction required Diab and the store to do only what the ADA already required them to do. The court acknowledged that courts routinely treat ADA plaintiffs who obtain default judgment and injunctive relief as prevailing parties, and that Ninth Circuit precedent “appear[s] to presume prevailing-party status” in that situation, but concluded that none of those precedents had squarely analyzed the question. The court further found that even if Price were a prevailing party, her requested fees were unreasonable: her motion appeared to be recycled nearly whole-cloth from a different case, resulting in incorrect male pronouns for Price throughout, and the court questioned the hours billed. The court did not reach what a reasonable fee would be if Price prevailed.
In the published case of Price v. Diab, No. 25-713 (9th Cir., July 2026) — the Ninth Circuit reversed the district court’s order denying Price’s motion for attorney’s fees and remanded for further proceedings on the fee motion.
The panel held, after reviewing the prevailing-party question de novo, that Price prevailed by virtue of the final injunctive relief she obtained. Under Farrar v. Hobby (1992) 506 U.S. 103, a plaintiff prevails when relief on the merits materially alters the legal relationship between the parties by modifying the defendant’s behavior in a way that directly benefits the plaintiff, and the Supreme Court has since confirmed in Lackey v. Stinnie (2025) 604 U.S. 192 that an enforceable court order conclusively resolving the parties’ rights on the merits satisfies that test. Price’s injunction, which forced Diab and the store to take specific, enforceable steps to improve accessibility, did exactly that.
The panel held the district court’s contrary conclusion rested on a misreading of Fischer v. SJB-P.D. Inc. (9th Cir. 2000) 214 F.3d 1115. The district court had seized on language in Fischer stating that a plaintiff’s legal relationship with a defendant changes because the plaintiff can force the defendant to do something it otherwise would not have to do, reading that to mean an injunction merely requiring compliance with preexisting law does not confer prevailing-party status. But the panel explained that sentence in Fischer referred back to the settled principle that a material alteration occurs when a plaintiff becomes entitled to enforce a judgment or settlement against a defendant — and Fischer itself rejected the same “the defendant already had to comply with the law” argument that the district court accepted here, holding that the Supreme Court has never framed the prevailing-party inquiry in terms of whether a defendant’s underlying legal duty changed. The panel found this reasoning reinforced by the Supreme Court’s per curiam decision in Lefemine v. Wideman (2012) 568 U.S. 1, which reversed a court of appeals that had denied fees on the theory that an injunction “merely ordered defendants to comply with the law.”
The panel also rejected two narrower grounds the district court had invoked. First, relying on Fischer and on the Supreme Court’s decision in Buckhannon Board & Care Home, Inc. v. West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources (2001) 532 U.S. 598, the panel confirmed that a plaintiff can be a prevailing party based exclusively on injunctive relief, without any award of money damages. Second, the panel held that a default judgment is itself an enforceable judgment on the merits sufficient to confer prevailing-party status, citing Vogel v. Harbor Plaza Center, LLC (9th Cir. 2018) 893 F.3d 1152, and that the relief Price obtained was not the kind of merely technical, insignificant victory that Farrar found insufficient.
On the amount of fees, the panel left that determination to the district court in the first instance but addressed one argument along the way. Price’s counsel had not disputed reusing a fee-motion template from a different case, but argued on appeal that the resulting errors, including the incorrect pronouns, were “irrelevant editing mistakes.” The panel rejected that characterization, explaining that such errors reflect a lack of diligence relevant to the quality of representation courts may weigh in setting a reasonable fee. The panel noted its own precedent allows a reduced fee award in a “straightforward” ADA case with boilerplate pleadings and little opposition, citing Shayler v. 1310 PCH, LLC (9th Cir. 2022) 51 F.4th 1015, and left it to the district court to weigh those concerns in calculating a reasonable award now that Price has been confirmed as the prevailing party.