Article posted this morning and available here.  First three paragraphs below. As an aside, the environmental attorney cited in the article is an Oregon Law alum.  The more important questions this article raises relate to the availability of attorney fees in a wide range of contexts in which fee-shifting is an important settlement dynamic.

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When the Center for Biological Diversity sued the U.S. Forest Service in Colorado in 2012 for violating the Endangered Species Act, government lawyers didn’t put up a fight.
Rather than answering the complaint, U.S. Department of Justice lawyers promptly settled the case, involving the greenback cutthroat trout — Colorado’s state fish — and handed the center a victory. As part of the deal, the government agreed to pay the center’s attorney fees — $40,000 for work by two in-house lawyers that, at least on paper, consisted mainly of filing a notice of intent to sue, a complaint and motions for extensions of time.The award was justified because the case was so complicated, the Justice Department said. But the suit also gave the government what Timothy Ream, one of the lawyers for the center, termed “political cover” to ban all-terrain vehicles from trails that cross four miles of a creek that’s the only place in the world where the fish live.In some ways, the case looks like a classic example of “sue and settle.” In recent years, business groups and landowners have alleged that federal agencies are settling environmental suits on sweetheart terms as a means of back-door regulation, then paying attorney fees to help fund another round of suits.
Still, a closer look at this case and similar others shows that “sue and settle” cases are rarely as simple as they seem.  …