§ 9-15-14.Litigation costs and attorney’s fees assessed for frivolous actions and defenses

Subsection (a) sets a mandatory standard. In any civil action in a court of record, a party who faced a claim, defense, or other position marked by a complete absence of any justiciable issue of law or fact — one no court could reasonably have been expected to accept — shall be awarded reasonable and necessary attorney’s fees and litigation expenses. The court decides who pays: the fees may be assessed against the party who advanced the claim or defense, against that party’s attorney, or against both, in whatever split the court finds just.

Subsection (b) supplies a second, discretionary path, reachable on the motion of any party or the court’s own initiative. The court may assess fees and expenses if it finds that an attorney or party brought or defended an action, or a part of it, that “lacked substantial justification” — a term the statute itself defines as substantially frivolous, substantially groundless, or substantially vexatious — or that the action or part of it was interposed for delay or harassment, or that an attorney or party unnecessarily expanded the proceeding through other improper conduct, expressly including abuses of the discovery procedures available under Chapter 11 of this title. Subsection (c) then draws a line courts are told to respect: no attorney or party can be assessed fees for a claim or defense the court finds was pressed in a good-faith attempt to establish a new theory of law in Georgia, so long as that theory rests on some recognized precedential or persuasive authority.

The remaining subsections govern how an award works in practice. Fees and expenses can’t exceed what’s reasonable and necessary to defend or assert the party’s rights, though the court may also award the fees spent obtaining the order itself. A motion for fees may come at any point during the case but must be filed no later than 45 days after the action’s final disposition. The award itself is a matter for the judge, not the jury, and once entered it functions as an enforceable money judgment.

Two more provisions round out the section. An award entered in a prior action between the same parties gets treated as court costs if either party files a subsequent action, and the whole section is off-limits in magistrate court — except that an appellee defending a magistrate court win can still recover litigation expenses incurred there if the appeal itself lacks substantial justification. It’s also worth knowing that this isn’t Georgia’s only frivolous-litigation fee statute: the offer-of-settlement provisions in Code Section 9-11-68(e) create a parallel route to fees for a frivolous claim or defense, but they require the party seeking fees to elect between that procedure and this one for the same claim or defense — a party can’t run both tracks side by side.