Every Florida civil litigator knows the drill. You prevail at trial, the court confirms your client's entitlement to fees under a statute or contract, and then the real work begins: scheduling an evidentiary hearing, retaining a fee expert, preparing your billing attorney to testify, and watching your client's net recovery shrink as the cost of proving up the fees stacks on top of the fees themselves. It is one of the most familiar — and most criticized — rituals in Florida practice.
On March 20, 2026, Florida's Sixth District Court of Appeal told us that ritual has never actually been required by law.
In Ruffenach v. Deutsche Bank National Trust Co., Case No. 6D2023-1482, the Sixth District held that a trial court "need not always conduct an evidentiary hearing or receive expert testimony concerning the reasonableness of attorneys' fees before granting an award of attorneys' fees pursuant to a statute, rule, or contractual provision providing for such an award." In doing so, the court certified direct conflict with thirty-seven decisions of the First, Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Districts — a tee-up that all but guarantees Florida Supreme Court review.
How We Got Here
The Sixth District's opinion, authored by Judge Mize, traces the expert-testimony requirement back to a single 1964 case from the Second District: Lyle v. Lyle, 167 So. 2d 256. Lyle announced that the value of an attorney's services must be proven by expert testimony and that an attorney's own testimony about his fees was too self-serving to support an award. The court cited no authority for either proposition.
From there, the rule spread by repetition. District courts cited Lyle. Later decisions cited those decisions. Within a decade, the rule was treated as black-letter law across every district, and the corollary evidentiary-hearing requirement followed naturally — after all, if you must have expert testimony, you need a hearing at which to take it.
The Sixth District points out that the Florida Supreme Court has never actually held that either requirement applies. The closest it has come is dicta in Crittenden Orange Blossom Fruit v. Stone, 514 So. 2d 351 (Fla. 1987), and even that case's actual holding cut the other way (no expert testimony or hearing required in workers' compensation fee proceedings). The court also notes that Florida Patient's Compensation Fund v. Rowe, 472 So. 2d 1145 (Fla. 1985) — the seminal lodestar case — never imposed either requirement.
Equally important, federal courts apply the same lodestar analysis, regularly award fees on affidavits alone, and have long recognized that the trial judge is herself an expert on local attorney's fees. The Sixth District found this persuasive, and frankly, so should we.
The Court's Reasoning
The Sixth District's analysis comes down to two clean points.
First, the rule that a billing attorney's testimony is too "self-serving" to support a fee award is inconsistent with every other corner of Florida evidence law. We routinely allow interested witnesses to testify; the trier of fact weighs credibility. Treating fee witnesses as a special category has no doctrinal anchor.
Second, trial judges already are experts on attorney's fees in their communities. They preside over fee hearings constantly, they see what local lawyers charge and how long tasks reasonably take, and — critically — they have the unique advantage of having actually watched the underlying litigation. The Fourth District made this observation more than two decades ago in Island Hoppers, Ltd. v. Keith, 820 So. 2d 967 (Fla. 4th DCA 2002), and the Fifth District echoed it in Sea World of Florida v. Ace American Insurance Cos., 28 So. 3d 158 (Fla. 5th DCA 2010). Neither court was willing to take the next step. The Sixth District was.
As for evidentiary hearings, the court drew a sensible line: where the only "dispute" is whether the rates and hours are reasonable — questions on which the trial judge is an expert — no hearing is required. Where genuine factual disputes exist (for example, whether the case could have been resolved earlier without litigation, or whether a contingency multiplier is warranted) or where the dispute touches on something outside judicial expertise, an evidentiary hearing and possibly expert testimony may still be needed.
What the Court Did Not Say
The opinion is admirably precise about its limits, and practitioners should be too. Ruffenach does not hold that affidavits alone will always suffice. It does not prohibit a party from retaining a fee expert if doing so will strengthen the presentation. And it does not excuse the prevailing party from submitting detailed time records — in fact, the Sixth District reversed the fee award in Ruffenach itself precisely because the prevailing party failed to submit billing records substantiating the work performed.
The opinion also flags contingency-multiplier disputes as a category where expert testimony may still be genuinely useful, since the multiplier turns on market conditions outside the typical trial judge's day-to-day expertise.
What This Means for Your Practice — Today
The most important thing to understand is that Ruffenach is binding only within the Sixth District. Outside the Sixth District, trial courts remain bound by the long line of precedent from the other districts under Pardo v. State, 596 So. 2d 665 (Fla. 1992). For now, lawyers in Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade should continue to retain fee experts and request evidentiary hearings as a matter of course.
That said, the conflict certification is the practical headline. With thirty-seven cases certified in direct conflict, this question is heading to the Florida Supreme Court, and the answer will reshape fee litigation statewide.
A few practical suggestions in the meantime:
If you are litigating a fee motion outside the Sixth District and believe the Ruffenach analysis is correct, preserve the issue. Make a clear record that you are arguing the Lyle line was wrongly decided, cite Ruffenach, note the certified conflict, and state on the record that you are preserving the issue for appellate review. Even if the trial court correctly applies binding district precedent against you, the preservation matters once the Supreme Court speaks.
If you are defending against a fee motion, the calculus does not change much yet — but be aware that opposing counsel may begin trying to bypass expert testimony and hearings in reliance on Ruffenach, and you should be prepared to object where existing district precedent still controls.
For practitioners in the Sixth District (which covers a significant swath of Central Florida, including Orange, Osceola, Seminole, and others), Ruffenach is the law right now. Trial courts in those circuits are no longer required to hold an evidentiary hearing or accept expert testimony before entering a fee award, provided the only contested issues are rates and hours and the prevailing party has submitted adequate billing records.
Credit Where It's Due
The Sixth District deserves real credit for the scholarship behind Ruffenach — the careful tracing of the doctrine to its origins, the close engagement with the foundational Florida Supreme Court fee cases, and the willingness to reason from first principles on a question Florida lawyers have largely treated as settled. Opinions like this one are a reminder of how much value an appellate court can add when it takes the time to revisit familiar ground.
Whether the Florida Supreme Court ultimately adopts the Sixth District's view or reaffirms the longstanding practice, Ruffenach has already prompted a useful conversation across the Florida bar about how attorney's fee awards are proven up, and the proper role of expert testimony and evidentiary hearings in that process.
We will be watching the Supreme Court's docket closely. In the meantime, the firm is reviewing its open fee matters across all districts to identify cases in which the Ruffenach issue should be preserved.