Lady Gaga Self-Axes Own Attorneys’ Fee Request While Lost Files A Notice Of Appeal

It's Mayhem.

Most people assume that a judgment in a civil lawsuit is the end of the road. In reality, it’s just the beginning, at least from a monetary perspective. A judgment is a piece of paper. If you want to tack any awardable attorneys’ fees onto it, you need to file a motion. Even then, you need to go try to collect on the lawsuit, which can often be far more difficult than obtaining that judgment in the first place. 

In this regard, a judgment creditor’s strategy is typically to leverage financial pain against the judgment debtor (assuming the debtor is solvent and does not file a bankruptcy petition) and make the judgment debtor’s life hell with things like levies, liens, judicial property sales,  post-judgment discovery, and debtor’s examinations, all with the goal of negotiating a collaterally-secured settlement agreement that is roughly fifty cents on the dollar of the overall judgment.  The bigger the judgment, the more pain you can threaten and/or leverage against someone with assets (and Lost clearly has assets).

Against this backdrop, Lady Gaga’s peculiar decision to only seek $232,484.50 in attorneys’ fees against Lost in the wake of the Court’s dismissal of Lost’s lawsuit warrants a bit of a breakdown.  It is not the approach I would take—I would have made a request for 100% of the total fees incurred, or in the alternative, the fees incurred after the Court denied Lost’s motion for preliminary injunction.  That being said, I don’t represent Ms. Gaga, and there may be things going on behind the curtain that I am not aware of that are driving this strategic decision. 

Here’s the TLDR version:  Lady Gaga won the lawsuit Lost filed against her, she is almost certainly entitled to at least some of her attorneys’ fees, but she limited her fee request to a roughly one-month period of work in the amount of $232,484.50, when she clearly must have expended over $1 million since this lawsuit was filed in March of last year.  Lost, meanwhile, remains undeterred and has filed a notice of appeal.

According to the motion, Gaga’s attorneys are only asking for fees incurred between the time that the Court denied Lost’s motion for preliminary injunction in December of last year, through the date of dismissal last month. But that represents about one month of work given that Lady Gaga’s motion to dismiss was filed in January of this year and the Court “stayed” (i.e. put on hold) any discovery pending its decision on the motion to dismiss the same month. Put differently, very little would have been happening in this lawsuit between January of this year and the date of dismissal.

In my prior articles, I estimated that Lady Gaga’s attorneys would have easily billed her well over $1 million in connection with this lawsuit to date.  The fee motion itself, which states that it is only asking for 144.9 hours of attorney time, is consistent with that.  A $232,484.50 fee request arising from 144.9 hours of attorney time represents a $1,605.24 blended rate average among all billing attorneys.  So, even if we were to assume that only half of the 144.9 hours of attorney time requested within the motion was expended every month at that rate between March 2025 (when the lawsuit was filed) and December 2025, that is easily over $1 million in attorneys’ fees that Ms. Gaga has incurred.

So why has Lady Gaga requested far less in her fee motion than she must have expended to date?

I cannot say for sure. Maybe $1 million is just a drop in the bucket for her.

One strategic explanation might be to ensure that Judge Olguin actually rules that the case was “exceptional” for attorneys’ fees purposes.  If Gaga asked for 100% of what she incurred since responding to this lawsuit, that number could be so large that Judge Olguin might be offended by the request, deem it excessive, and decide that the case is not “exceptional,” meaning that no attorneys’ fees would be awarded to Gaga at all.  And Gaga’s attorneys might be reading the room with their judge here, since Olguin has previously been reversed by the 9th Circuit on account of arbitrarily reducing attorneys’ fees requests to a fraction of what was actually expended and requested.

Another explanation is that this decision might have been aimed at deterring Lost from appealing the judgment and/or incentivizing Lost to enter into a settlement agreement where Lost withdraws an appeal. This is because Judge Olguin is extremely likely to find that this was “an exceptional case,” and if the underlying lawsuit is deemed “exceptional,” then the appeal is deemed “exceptional” for attorneys’ fees purposes. Should that occur and Lost loses an appeal, a firm like Gibson Dunn (who will bill the ever-loving hell out of an appeal) can ask for 100% of its fees on appeal. 

However, if deterrence was the strategy here, it clearly did not work, at least not yet—Lost just filed a notice of appeal yesterday, so Biolos’ silly crusade continues.

The next steps regarding the fee motion will be an opposition and reply brief filed, and then Judge Olguin will likely sit on another fully briefed motion for over six months before ruling on it. I expect he will grant Lady Gaga’s motion and award her the full amount she is requesting though.

On the appellate front, the 9th Circuit is going to set a briefing schedule after receiving the record on appeal, all briefing will be completed within a little over 90 days from then, and then there will be a waiting period between 6 – 18 months (or potentially longer) before there’s even an oral argument set on the appeal.  After oral argument, it will be roughly 6 – 9 months before the 9th Circuit rules on the appeal.

As I’ve said previously, Lost is unlikely to win this appeal, but even if it does, the default rule is that the case goes back to your same trial judge after the appellate court reverses the trial court. That means that Lost would be right back in front of Judge Olguin, who is likely going to find an independent way to dismiss Lost’s lawsuit before it ever goes to trial. 

In fact, Judge Olguin has done this in the past in another high-profile case with respect to the guy who was on the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind album cover (remember when we gave a shit about album covers?) as a baby (hereinafter “Nevermind Baby Man”). There, Olguin initially dismissed Nevermind Baby Man’s Complaint in the early stages, the Court of Appeal reversed, and Olguin nevertheless granted the Defendants’ motion for summary judgment and dismissed the case on other grounds after the case was reversed and remanded back down to him. I feel like there might be a Kurt Cobain shotgun joke that might be made in relation thereto, but that would clearly be in poor taste.

In this case, Olguin dismissed Lost’s lawsuit on the grounds that Lady Gaga’s use of the word Mayhem was “expressive” and protected by the First Amendment. If he gets reversed and remanded, he could just as easily grant a motion for summary judgment and dismiss the lawsuit a second time based on a lack of evidence of likelihood of confusion.

If and when there’s an order on Lady Gaga’s fee motion or the appeal is fully briefed, I’ll report back.  And if you’ve read this far, can you imagine having to actually deal with this nonsense for a living and maintain any modicum of sanity?  Fortunately for me, I strayed very far afield from the path of sanity a long time ago—we’re all mad here