Plaintiff hired a law firm to represent him in a workers' compensation and tort action. The plaintiff thereafter terminated the law firm's representation, and the lawyer working on the plaintiff's case left the law firm and continued to represent the Plaintiff. After a settlement was reached, the law firm intervened in the action seeking a "quantum meruit” lien on the attorney fee awarded in that action and likewise sought to recover a “reasonable fee” for the work performed on the case. The trial court entered a judgment denying the law firm's request for an award of attorney fees, and the law firm appealed the trial court's judgment to the Court of Civil Appeals.

The Alabama Court of Civil Appeals distinguished this case from prior holdings based on the fact that the trial court conducted a hearing and received ore tenus evidence on the recovery of attorney fees. Accordingly, the Court of Appeals found that it reviewed the trial court’s finding with a presumption of correctness. Because the firm’s contract for employment was not simply a “contingency” basis, but also was based on the “fair value” of its services, the Court held that “it was incumbent upon the firm to ensure that its employees maintained some reasonable, contemporaneous documentation of the time spent working on Plaintiff’s case, and it bore the risk of failing to do so. Additionally, the trial court's judgment specifically indicated that it reviewed the record and found that "the time randomly assigned bears no reasonable relationship to the actual time it would have taken to either read or prepare most all of the documents listed on the indexes." Based on this, Court of Appeals held that the trial court could have reasonably concluded that the firm had failed to meet its burden of proving that it was entitled to an award of attorney fees.

The Personnel Board's order suspended Key for 30 days without pay from his position as a police officer for the City of Irondale. Key's suspension was based on an allegation that Key had used excessive force against an inmate. The Personnel Board, however, made an express factual finding in its order that Key's actions were "necessary to further restrain the [inmate], who subsequent to being restrained, continued to engage in conduct that could be deemed disruptive and could have potentially endangered the officers present." Key argued that the circuit court should have found that the Personnel Board's order was unreasonable and arbitrary because he was suspended based on allegations of excessive force, but the Personnel Board expressly found that his actions were necessary to restrain the inmate. The basis of the charges against Key was the allegation of the use of excessive force.

On appeal, the City of Irondale and the Personnel Board argued that the petition was subject to the timeliness requirement in Rule 21(a)(3), Ala. R. App. P., which provides: "The petition shall be filed within a reasonable time. The presumptively reasonable time for filing a petition seeking review of an order of a trial court or of a lower appellate court shall be the same as the time for taking an appeal.” Key filed his petition 202 days after the entry of the circuit court's order without providing a statement of circumstances constituting good cause for a belated filing pursuant to Rule 21(a)(3). However, Rule 21 excludes “those cases where ... review of decisions of the three-judge Jefferson County panel or decisions of the Jefferson County Personnel Board.” Accordingly, the Court of Appeals found that Key’s appeal fell within the exclusion, and was not therefore time barred. Further the Court held that the Board’s suspension of Key was inconsistent with the express factual findings and therefore lacked “reasonable justification.” Accordingly, Key’s appeal was granted and the case was reversed and remanded.