Ray Haluch Gravel Co. v. Central Pension Fund, ___ U.S. ___ (2014). In New Jersey state court, if attorneys’ fee issues remain to be adjudicated, any judgment entered is considered interlocutory, not final, until the fee issue is resolved. See, e.g., General Motors v. City of Linden, 279 N.J. Super. 449, 454-56 (App. Div. 1995), rev’d on other grounds, 143 N.J. 336 (1996). The law in federal court, however, is different. Budinich v. Becton Dickinson & Co., 486 U.S. 196 (1988), ruled that a decision on the merits is a final decision for appeal purposes even if the issue of attorneys’ fees remains to be determined.
Budinich involved an issue of statutory fee-shifting. The issue in the present case was whether the same rule applied where fee shifting was provided under the parties’ contract. In a unanimous opinion by Justice Kennedy, the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Budinich rule would govern. As a result, a party who waited until after the fee decision to appeal both the underlying ruling and the fee decision was too late to appeal the underlying ruling.
The Court’s decision thus creates a bright line. In federal practice, a decision is immediately appealable even though a ruling on attorneys’ fees remains outstanding. That is so regardless of whether the claimed right to fees arises from a statute or from a contract. In New Jersey practice, however, the rule is the opposite: a decision remains interlocutory until fee issues are resolved.