Contractual attorney fees; Pransky v Falcon Group, Inc; Statute of limitations (SOL); MCL 600.5807(1) & (9); Accrual; Applicability of the Pirgu v United Servs Auto Ass’n analysis; Smith v Khouri; Wood v Detroit Auto Inter-Ins Exch; The law of the case doctrine; Fees incurred in related bankruptcy proceedings; Whether those proceedings were “any legal proceedings commenced to enforce” the contract; Motion to reinstate a previously overturned judgment; The “rule of mandate”; Great Lakes Eye Institute, PC (GLEI)

The court held that defendant-Krebs’s claim for contractual attorney fees was not barred by the SOL and concluded that it was appropriate to apply the Pirgu factors here. But it found that the trial court abused its discretion in “using the ‘additional relevant factors’ prong of its Pirgu analysis as a backdoor method of relitigating the issue of whether Krebs’s employment contract had been assigned to” plaintiff-GLEI. It determined the trial court did not err in denying Krebs’s request for attorney fees arising from related bankruptcy proceedings, or in refusing to exceed the scope of the court’s remand order by reinstating the judgment in GLEI’s favor overturned in a prior appeal. Thus, the court reversed the trial court’s decision to reduce Krebs’s attorney fee award to $0 and remanded for further proceedings. “On remand, the trial court shall reinstate the award of $227,273.48 plus additional reasonable attorney fees accrued during the course of this appeal.” It affirmed the trial court’s order in all other respects. As to the accrual of Krebs’s contractual attorney fee claim, the court noted that he “was not the prevailing party until after the trial court granted summary disposition in his favor, so his claim for prevailing-party attorney fees did not accrue until then.” Thus, it was not time-barred. But the court rejected his assertion the trial court erred in applying Pirgu in this case involving a contractual fee-shifting provision. The court noted that it “has applied the Smith framework” in reviewing the issue of the reasonableness of contractual attorney fees. “Because Pirgu folded Smith into its framework, and Smith has been applied to contractual attorney-fee cases, there is no reason to conclude that the trial court committed a general legal error by applying Pirgu in a case involving contractual attorney fees. Nor is there a specific basis under the parties’ contract that would indicate that the trial court should not have applied the Pirgu framework.” Turning to the trial court’s use of the “additional relevant factors” Pirgu prong, it determined that Krebs had prevailed on the “false premise” that the contract was not assigned to GLEI. But pursuant to the court’s decision in “Krebs II, the law of the case is that this premise is true; the contract was not assigned to GLEI.” As a result, the trial court’s decision to reduce Krebs’s attorney fee award to $0 ran afoul of the law of the case doctrine.