The corporation representing homeowners and shareholders along Oswego Lake does not have to produce legal fee records in the proceedings over whether — and how much — losing parties in the Oswego Lake case have to pay the plaintiffs.

In March, the Clackamas County Circuit Court ruled in favor of plaintiffs Mark Kramer and Todd Prager’s contention that the city of Lake Oswego’s former policy barring access to the lake from its local park facilities was not lawful. Upon the ruling, the city opened access to the lake from the steps at Millennium Plaza Park and implemented rules for such entry.

Following the court ruling, the plaintiffs filed a motion asking for the court to require the defendants — the city of Lake Oswego, the State of Oregon and intervenor-defendant Lake Corporation to pay attorney fees totaling more than $1.3 million.

As part of that process, the plaintiffs filed another motion asking for the Lake Corporation — which managed access to the water body and forbade the general public from using what it considered to be a private lake for decades — and the city to produce records of their own legal fees and on an expedited timeframe. The city produced the fee information to the plaintiffs, but the Lake Corporation declined to do so.

According to a lawyer for the plaintiff and confirmed by a representative of the Lake Corporation, the court ruled in favor of the Lake Corporation during a hearing Monday, May 5.

In prior filings, the Lake Corporation made its case for why its own fees were off limits from records production.

“No Oregon authority permits a party that has filed a fee petition to obtain the billing records of an opposing party where the opposing party has not put its own fees at issue in the case. Instead, courts have made clear that attorney billing records of an opposing party are not relevant, and therefore not discoverable under ORCP 36B(1),” a filing from the Lake Corporation reads. “In this case, Lake Corp has not used its own fees as a comparator, and it has not sought compensation for any of its own attorney fees. As a result, its own fees are not relevant to Plaintiffs’ request for fees—or any other issue in this case.”

In their own filings, the plaintiffs noted that the corporation questioned the veracity of their listed legal costs. In turn, they argued that forcing the corporation to submit legal fees would provide the court with a point of comparison — thus helping to determine the legitimacy of the plaintiffs’ fee claims.

“Lake Oswego Corp opened the door to the discovery that Plaintiffs seek, by objecting to Plaintiffs’ fee petition on the basis that the fees are unreasonable. Plaintiffs are entitled to the discovery to rebut that objection,” a plaintiff filing reads.

The city, the Lake Corporation and the state of Oregon have argued in separate filings that they should not have to pay the plaintiffs’ legal fees.