EBEL, Circuit Judge.
This appeal arises from a significantly reduced award of attorneys fees in a hard-fought First Amendment case. In this case, by reducing the plaintiffs’ fee request almost in half, the district court seriously undermined the important principles at stake in the Civil Rights Attorney’s Fees Awards Act, codified at 42 U.S.C. § 1988 (1994). Because the reasons offered by the district court in support of its reduction of the fee request are clearly erroneous, we find that the court has abused its discretion, and we remand for further consideration.
Background
This case has wended its way through the courts for more than five years, with multiple disputes over attorneys fees. Because of the complexity of the fees issue here, we must reiterate much of the procedural history of the case even though the facts of the substantive dispute are fully recounted in our 1995 decision. See Robinson v. City of Edmond, 68 F.3d 1226, 1228 (10th Cir.1995), cert. denied, 517 U.S. 1201, 116 S.Ct. 1702, 134 L.Ed.2d 801 (1996).
This litigation began in 1993 when certain residents and business people of Edmond, Oklahoma, sued the city and its officials over the city’s use of a Latin cross in the city’s official seal. Edmond had adopted the seal in 1965 following a competition sponsored by the city and a local newspaper. After almost a generation of use of the Latin cross on city vehicles, city flags, city road signs and city letterheads, the plaintiffs here challenged the city’s official seal on the grounds that it infringed their free exercise of religion by endorsing and compelling adherence to the Christian faith and it unconstitutionally established a religion, both in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The plaintiffs also alleged violations of the religious liberty and non-sectarian clauses of the Oklahoma Constitution, Art. I, § 2 and Art. II, § 5. Bringing suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, the plaintiffs sought “nominal actual damages” of at least $25 against each defendant, and declaratory and injunctive relief.
On various motions for summary judgment from the defendants, the district court dismissed the plaintiffs’ Free Exercise Clause and related state-constitution claims, as well as the plaintiffs’ claims for damages against the city officials in their individual capacities. See Robinson, 68 F.3d at 1228. However, the court scheduled a bench trial for the plaintiffs’ Establishment Clause claim against the city and its officials. Following a two-day trial, the court ruled in favor of the defendants, finding that the use of the Latin cross did not violate the Establishment Clause under the test set forth in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602, 91 S.Ct. 2105, 29 L.Ed.2d 745 (1971). See Robinson, 68 F.3d at 1228.
After the district court’s judgment, the defendants sought reimbursement from the plaintiffs for the time spent by the city’s three private attorneys — $117,083 in attorneys’ fees — as well as other costs, under 42 U.S.C. § 1988(b).1 The district court awarded only a small portion of this request, finding that the plaintiffs’ Establishment Clause claim and the related Oklahoma Constitution claim were “not frivolous,” but that the Free Exercise Clause claim was “without foundation” because the plaintiffs had conceded in their depositions that they were free to exercise their religion. On the basis of these findings, the district court awarded the defendants $2,361 in attorneys’ fees incurred in defending against the Free Exercise claim.2
[1279]*1279The plaintiffs first appealed the district court’s substantive decision on the Establishment Clause claim, and they subsequently filed a second appeal of the attorneys’ fees order. The plaintiffs did not appeal the district court’s summary judgment on the Free Exercise claim or the dismissal of claims against city leaders in their individual capacities. Both appeals were consolidated in a single decision, in which we reversed the trial court. See Robinson, 68 F.3d at 1228. We concluded that under Lemon v. Kurtzman and its progeny, the city’s use of the Latin cross conveyed a message that a particular religious belief was preferred. See id. at 1232-33. As a result, we found that the city’s official seal violated the Establishment Clause. See id. In light of this conclusion, we held that the plaintiffs were prevailing parties under 42 U.S.C. § 1988(b), and we remanded the district court’s award of attorneys’ fees for “a redetermination.” See id. at 1233.
The defendants petitioned for a writ of certiorari, which was denied over a dissent by Chief Justice Rehnquist, joined by Justices Sealia and Thomas. See City of Edmond v. Robinson, 517 U.S. 1201, 116 S.Ct. 1702, 134 L.Ed.2d 801 (1996). In his dissent, the Chief Justice said there was an important circuit split over the question of whether religious symbols in a municipal seal violated the Establishment Clause. See id. (Rehnquist, C.J., dissenting). Furthermore, the Chief Justice argued that this case presented an important question of standing in the context of an Establishment Clause claim, which the Tenth Circuit’s opinion had not addressed. See id. at 1202-03, 116 S.Ct. 1702 (Rehnquist, C.J., dissenting).
On remand, the district court awarded the plaintiffs nominal damages of $1 against each defendant, and the court entered a permanent injunction barring the use of the Latin cross in the city’s official seal. The plaintiffs also submitted an application for their attorney’s fees under 42 U.S.C. § 1988(b). The plaintiffs requested $186,008.75 in attorney’s fees and $3,150.80 in litigation expenses.3 In support of this request, the plaintiffs attached billing records showing that Michael C. Salem, the plaintiffs’ lead attorney, had discounted his hours by 7.7 percent, leading to a total request for 1,048.4 hours at an hourly rate of $175 per hour.4 The plaintiffs also requested reimbursement for nearly 33.85 hours of time spent by a law clerk in Salem’s office, at $75 per hour.
The defendants generally objected to this fee request as unreasonable, but they specifically articulated objections to only $43,-732.50 of the fee request, leaving $142,276.25 in requested attorney’s fees not separately contested. In response to the defendants’ contention that the plaintiffs’ attorney had engaged in “block-billing,” the plaintiffs submitted the individual time slips for Salem, recounting the specific tasks he worked on each day and how much time he allotted to each task.
The district court rendered a total award under § 1988(b) of $105,720.89, which was well below the amount the defendants had left uneontested.5 The court said it had no doubt that Salem actually had worked all of the hours he claimed, and the court did not dispute his hourly rate of $175, although the court reduced the hourly rate of Salem’s legal assistant, Vincent J. Liesenfeld. The court also found that the plaintiffs’ various claims were “interrelated, ... nonfrivolous, and asserted in good faith,” and that the degree of success achieved by the plaintiffs “was great.” Nevertheless, the court said the plaintiffs’ claim for 1,048.4 hours was [1280]*1280unreasonable in light of the court’s conclusion that this “was a fairly simple, straightforward lawsuit.” The court added that it felt the amount of hours expended was excessive because of the plaintiffs’ “only partial success.” Furthermore, responding to the plaintiffs’ argument that their fee request was reasonable in comparison to the amount of hours that had been claimed by the defendants in the defendants’ earlier aborted fee request, the court held that the alleged hours expended by the defendant were also unreasonable if they were as large as asserted, and thus, defendants’ hours would not provide support for plaintiffs’ request. Finally, without any reference to the supplemental filing from the plaintiffs that provided evidence of the detailed billing records for Salem, the court contended that Salem’s use of “block-billing” had rendered it impossible for the court “to precisely identify the hours which were excessive and duplicative.” As a result of these findings, the district court applied an across-the-board cut of 45 percent in the hours claimed by the plaintiffs’ attorney, reducing his compensation from 1,048.4 hours to 576.62 hours, and it reduced the hourly fee for the plaintiffs’ law clerk from $75/hour to $50/hour.
The plaintiffs now appeal that portion of the fee award reducing the amount of hours claimed by the plaintiffs’ lawyer.6 We reverse and remand.
I. Attorney’s Fees under 42 U.S.C. § 1988(b)
The Civil Rights Attorney’s Fees Awards Act allows a prevailing party in a civil rights case, including suits brought under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, to seek reimbursement for his attorney’s fees, to the extent the fees are reasonable. See 42 U.S.C.A. § 1988(b) (West Supp.1998.).7 Although the power to award such fees is discretionary, that discretion is narrow once a civil rights plaintiff demonstrates that he is a “prevailing party.” See Phelps v. Hamilton, 120 F.3d 1126, 1129 (10th Cir.1997). The implication of our cases is that when a plaintiff prevails in a civil rights suit, the plaintiff ordinarily should not have his vindication of these rights eviscerated by an obligation to pay his attorney’s reasonable fees.
In light of the discretionary nature of the district court’s decision, we review an attorney’s fee award under 42 U.S.C. § 1988(b) for an abuse of discretion. See Phelps, 120 F.3d at 1129. This standard of review applies to both the court’s decision to award fees in the first place and the court’s determination of the amount of fees to be awarded. See Joseph A. ex rel. Wolfe v. New Mexico Dep’t of Human Servs., 28 F.3d 1056, 1058-59 (10th Cir.1994). Under this standard, we may reverse a district court’s underlying factual findings only if they are clearly erroneous, but we review the court’s statutory interpretation or other legal conclusions de novo. See Jane L. v. Bangerter, 61 F.3d 1505, 1509 (10th Cir.1995). Finally, contrary to the defendants’ assertion in this appeal, the determination of what constitutes a “reasonable” fee amount is not a factual finding insulated by the clear-error standard, but rather, the reasonableness determination is a mixed fact-law application which is itself subject to the general abuse-of-discretion standard. See id. at 1510 (holding that the abuse-of-discretion standard applies to a district court’s determination of an attorney’s “reasonable hours” and “reasonable hourly rate”); Smith v. Freeman, 921 F.2d 1120, 1122 (10th Cir.1990); Lucero v. City of Trinidad, 815 F.2d 1384, 1386 (10th Cir.1987); Mares v. Credit Bureau of Raton, 801 F.2d 1197, 1201 (10th Cir.1986); Ramos v. Lamm, 713 F.2d 546, 556 (10th Cir.1983).
In any fee request under § 1988(b), a claimant must prove two elements: (1) that the claimant was the “prevailing party” in the proceeding; and (2) that the claimant’s fee request is “reasonable.” See Hensley v. Eckerhart, 461 U.S. 424, 433, 103 S.Ct. 1933, 76 L.Ed.2d 40 (1983); Phelps, 120 F.3d at [1281]*12811129. In this case, there is no question that the plaintiffs were the prevailing party—we held as much in our earlier reversal of the district court’s first decision. See Robinson, 68 F.3d at 1233. Thus, the only question in this case is whether the plaintiffs established that their fee request was “reasonable.”
To determine the reasonableness of a fee request, a court must begin by calculating the so-called “lodestar amount” of a fee, and a claimant is entitled to the presumption that this lodestar amount reflects a “reasonable” fee. See Pennsylvania v. Delaware Valley Citizens’ Council for Clean Air, 478 U.S. 546, 563-65, 106 S.Ct. 3088, 92 L.Ed.2d 439 (1986); Cooper v. Utah, 894 F.2d 1169, 1171 (10th Cir.1990). The lodestar calculation is the product of the number of attorney hours “reasonably expended” and a “reasonable hourly rate.” See Hensley, 461 U.S. at 433, 103 S.Ct. 1933; Phelps, 120 F.3d at 1131. “Once an applicant for a fee has carried the burden of showing that the claimed rate and number of hours are reasonable, the resulting product is presumed to be a reasonable fee as contemplated by Section 1988.” Cooper, 894 F.2d at 1171.
In this appeal, the only issue in contention is the reasonableness of the hours expended by the plaintiffs’ attorney. This subsidiary reasonableness inquiry is controlled by the overriding consideration of whether the attorney’s hours were “necessary” under the circumstances. “The prevailing party must make a ‘good-faith effort to exclude from a fee request hours that are excessive, redundant, or otherwise unnecessary.’ ” Jane L., 61 F.3d at 1510 (quoting Hensley, 461 U.S. at 434, 103 S.Ct. 1933). A district court should approach this reasonableness inquiry “much as a senior partner in a private law firm would review the reports of subordinate attorneys when billing clients.... ” Ramos v. Lamm, 713 F.2d 546, 555 (10th Cir.1983). However, “[t]he record ought to assure us that the district court did not ‘eyeball’ the fee request and cut it down by an arbitrary percentage.... ” People Who Care v. Rockford Bd. of Educ., Sch. Dist. No. 205, 90 F.3d 1307, 1314 (7th Cir.1996) (quotations omitted).
The Ramos court suggested that among the factors to be considered were (1) whether the tasks being billed “would normally be billed to a paying client,” (2) the number of hours spent on each task, (3) “the complexity of the case,” (4) “the number of reasonable strategies pursued,” (5) “the responses necessitated by the maneuvering of the other side,” and (6) “potential duplication of services” by multiple lawyers. Id. at 554. As part of this reasonableness determination, a district court may discount requested attorney hours if the attorney fails to keep “meticulous, contemporaneous time records” that reveal “all hours for which compensation is requested and how those hours were allotted to specific tasks.” Id. at 553.
In this analysis, we ask what hours a reasonable attorney would have incurred and billed in the marketplace under similar circumstances. “In other words the object is to simulate the market where a direct market determination is infeasible.” Steinlauf v. Continental Illinois Corp., 962 F.2d 566, 572 (7th Cir.1992). As Congress noted when it enacted the fee-shifting provision in section 1988(b), the purpose behind this measure was not to give private lawyers an unwarranted windfall, but rather to ensure compensation “adequate to attract competent counsel.” See S.Rep. No. 94-1011, at 6 (1976), reprinted in 1976 U.S.C.C.A.N. 5908, 5913, quoted in Homeward Bound, Inc. v. Hissom Mem’l Ctr., 963 F.2d 1352, 1355 (10th Cir.1992). It goes without saying that if a court’s compensation is not adequate to match what the market will bear for a lawyer’s services, then competent lawyers will go elsewhere to offer their services. Such a result would do irreparable damage to our system of private enforcement of federal civil rights.
A. Simplicity of the case.
In the instant case, the district court offered several justifications for its reduction of the plaintiffs’ fee request, but at oral argument on appeal the defendants were willing to stand behind only one of those rationales: that this ease was “simple.” At the heart of the district court’s downward adjustment lies the court’s contention that “[t]his was a fairly simple, straightforward lawsuit.” The court concluded that nothing about the nature or history of the case “could [1282]*1282reasonably justify the number of hours expended by Plaintiffs’ counsel” because the case “was virtually a single-issue one.”
The court’s characterization of this case as “fairly simple” seems to derive in large part from the fact that the plaintiffs’ suit arose out of a single, easily observed and quickly understood fact — the city was displaying a religious symbol in its official seal. This single fact, however, generated reams of legal analysis in a case that highlighted an important circuit split and tempted three Supreme Court justices to grant certiorari to hear it. See City of Edmond v. Robinson, 517 U.S. 1201, 1201, 116 S.Ct. 1702, 134 L.Ed.2d 801 (1996) (Rehnquist, C.J., dissenting from denial of certiorari). During the pre-trial phase of this case, there were three separate motions for summary judgment as well as a motion to dismiss, each with response briefing. There were amici briefs from two separate interest groups, the Christian Legal Society of Oklahoma and Citizens for Keeping the Cross. There were discovery battles that led to motions to compel production, to strike experts, and to limit testimony, with response briefing on each. There were depositions of all parties, including a two-day deposition of the lead plaintiff. And, the trial itself took two full days. After the initial trial, the plaintiffs had to defend against three separate applications for attorneys fees filed by the defendants, as well as an application to tax costs. On appeal, this case focused on a difficult circuit split between the Fifth and Seventh Circuits on the question of religious symbols in municipal seals. See Harris v. City of Zion, 927 F.2d 1401 (7th Cir.1991); Murray v. City of Austin, 947 F.2d 147 (5th Cir.1991). Furthermore, there were competing precedents on the issue within the Tenth Circuit itself. Compare Foremaster v. City of St. George, 882 F.2d 1485, 1491 (10th Cir.1989) (holding that it was an open factual question, which couldn’t be resolved on summary judgment, as to whether the illustration of the St. George LDS temple in the city’s seal had the primary effect of endorsing the LDS Church) with Friedman v. Board of County Comm’rs, 781 F.2d 777, 778, 781-82 (10th Cir.1985) (holding that the official seal of Bernalillo County, with a Latin cross and the Spanish motto “CON ESTA VENCEMOS,” violated the Establishment Clause). As noted above, the split between the circuits became part of the basis for a dissent from the Supreme Court’s denial of certiorari in this case. See Robinson, 517 U.S. at 1201, 1202-03, 116 S.Ct. 1702 (1996) (Rehnquist, C.J., dissenting).
This procedural history unequivocally demonstrates that this case was far from “simple.” It was a ease in which thoughtful jurists strongly disagreed. Besides the central legal issues under the Establishment Clause — an area notorious for its difficult case law — the ease also involved a host of ancillary issues: individual liability of municipal officials, qualified or absolute immunity for municipal legislators, standing under Article III for plaintiffs to raise Establishment Clause claims, scope of Free Exercise rights in the context of facially non-coercive municipal conduct, attorney-client confidentiality for engagement letters, and use of experts to gauge public perceptions of religious symbols.
In this context, the district court’s findings — that the case was “fairly simple” and that it would have been unreasonable for plaintiffs sole counsel to have spent anything more than eleven weeks of his time on this case (at 50 hours a week) from start to finish — are clearly erroneous. Because these findings undergird the whole of the district court’s decision to reduce the plaintiffs’ fee request, the error on these findings requires us to reverse and remand the lower court’s judgment. We next address briefly the court’s other rationales for its downward adjustment.
B. Partial success.
Although the district court noted that the plaintiffs had prevailed in their principal goal of removing the Latin cross from the city’s official seal, the court nevertheless found that the plaintiffs had “achieved only partial success.” The court appears to have concluded that it should exclude all of the plaintiffs’ attorney hours associated with three unsuccessful claims: the Free Exercise Clause claim, the claim for individual-capacity liability against the city officials, and the claim for actual damages beyond merely [1283]*1283nominal damages. This conclusion, however, is legally indefensible in light of the fact that all of the unsuccessful claims were intertwined with the successful claims through a common core of facts or related legal theories.
There is no doubt that a district court may reduce a lodestar calculation on the grounds that a prevailing party has achieved only partial success. See Hensley, 461 U.S. at 436-37, 103 S.Ct. 1933; Jane L., 61 F.3d at 1510. However, as the Court noted in Hensley, many civil rights suits involve multiple claims based on “a common core of facts or ... related legal theories.” Hensley, 461 U.S. at 435, 103 S.Ct. 1933. In such cases, it is inappropriate for a district court to evaluate the individual claims as though they were discrete and severable. Litigants should be given the breathing room to raise alternative legal grounds without fear that merely raising an alternative theory will threaten the attorney’s subsequent compensation. Instead, a court should focus on the “significance of the overall relief’ that the prevailing party has won: “The result is what matters.” Id.
We have applied the teaching of Hensley to reverse a district court’s reduction of attorney’s fees for a plaintiff who prevailed on a part of her Equal Pay Act claim but failed on her Title VII claims&emdash;the facts supporting the plaintiffs unsuccessful claims were part of “one bundle of proof’ with the successful one, and thus the plaintiffs attorney was “entitled to be fully compensated.” See Tidwell v. Fort Howard Corp., 989 F.2d 406, 412-13 (10th Cir.1993). Similarly, in another case we found that various legal theories offered by plaintiffs in a challenge against a Utah waiting period for abortions were all interrelated, and as a result, success on the basis of one theory would require attorney compensation for all the related theories. See Jane L., 61 F.3d at 1512. Finally, in one of our most recent attorney’s fees cases, we rejected a Title VII defendant’s appeal calling for a reduction in a fee award granted to the plaintiff because we found that the plaintiffs unsuccessful state-law contract and emotional distress claims were all “intimately related” to her successful Title VII hostile work environment claim. See Smith v. Norwest Fin. Acceptance, Inc., 129 F.3d 1408, 1418-19 (10th Cir.1997).
These cases demonstrate that when a plaintiff achieves the principal goal of her lawsuit, lack of success on some of her interrelated claims may not be used as a basis for reducing the plaintiffs fee award. When a plaintiff achieves most or all of what she aimed for in a civil rights lawsuit, her lawyer should receive “a fully compensatory fee.” Hensley, 461 U.S. at 435, 103 S.Ct. 1933. As the Court said in Hensley, “the most critical factor is the degree of success obtained.” Id. at 436,103 S.Ct. 1933.
In the instant ease, it was clear from the very start of litigation that the plaintiffs’ principal goal was the removal of the religious emblem from the city’s seal. The plaintiffs suggested as much in their complaint when their only request for money damages sought an amount of “not less than $25.00 ... for nominal actual damages.” Although it is not entirely clear whether this demand should be read as requesting actual damages or nominal damages or both, it is clear that monetary relief was not a principal aim of the suit. As a result, when the plaintiffs won a permanent injunction requiring the removal of the Latin cross from Edmond’s official seal, as well as nominal damages of $1 against each defendant, they won virtually everything that they sought.
Furthermore, those claims that were unsuccessful for the plaintiffs were all “related” because they involved a common core of facts as well as closely linked legal theories. All of the claims in this case arose out of the single fact of the city’s use of a religious emblem in its official seal, and both the state-constitutional claims and the First Amendment claims tracked the same body of law.
There is no doubt that, as the Court said in Hensley, a fee request may be reduced when some of a plaintiff’s interrelated claims are unsuccessful. See Hensley, 461 U.S. at 436-37, 103 S.Ct. 1933. But, Hensley made it abundantly clear that failure on some interrelated claims is not nearly as important a factor as the “overall relief’ obtained by the plaintiff. See id. at 435, 103 S.Ct. 1933. As we said in Jane L., when a plaintiff relies on interrelated claims in support of a single [1284]*1284outcome, failure on some of those claims does not preclude a full recovery when the plaintiff achieves the outcome that she sought. See Jane L., 61 F.3d at 1512. Hensley establishes that what matters is the result, and in the instant case, the “result” for the plaintiffs was complete vindication. In this context, it was legally incorrect for the district court to reduce the plaintiffs’ fee request on the basis of the plaintiffs’ “only partial success” for their interrelated claims.
C. Comparison with opponent’s attorney hours.
The district court was similarly unpersuaded by the plaintiffs’ attempt to justify their hours expended by comparing that figure to the number of hours expended by the defendants’ lawyers. The court stated that if the defendants actually had expended anywhere near the number of hours of attorney time as suggested by the plaintiffs,8 then the amount of the defendants’ hours was simply “more unreasonable” and it could not be used to “transmute the amount of time spent by Plaintiffs’ counsel into something reasonable.”
The Tenth Circuit has long accepted the proposition that one of the factors useful in evaluating the reasonableness of the number of attorney hours in a fee request is “the responses necessitated by the maneuvering of the other side.” Ramos, 713 F.2d at 554. The Supreme Court has also recognized that part of an attorney’s calculus of the amount of time reasonably necessary for a case is the vigor which the opponents bring to the dispute. See City of Riverside v. Rivera, 477 U.S. 561, 580 n. 11, 106 S.Ct. 2686, 91 L.Ed.2d 466 (1986) (plurality opinion) (“ ‘The government cannot litigate tenaciously and then be heard to complain about the time necessarily spent by the plaintiff in response.’”) (quoting Copeland v. Marshall, 641 F.2d 880, 904 (D.C.Cir.1980)); see also 2 Mary Francis Derfner & Arthur D. Wolf, Court Awarded Attorney Fees, ¶ 16.02[8][b] (1997) (discussing cases that have held “the vehemence or tenacity of the opposition will justify an increase in the amount of time an attorney must necessarily — and therefore reasonably — spend in countering the opposition and winning the suit”).
The evidence of the hours expended by defense counsel is not, of course, an immutable yardstick of reasonableness, and it may be disregarded or discounted as a comparative factor if found to be unreasonable in its own right. However, here the effort expended by the defendants suggests at least that they viewed the case as sufficiently complex and serious to warrant the expenditure of large amounts of attorney time, and it highlights the tooth-and-nail litigating approach the city used in this ease. In light of this tenacious effort by the city and its lawyers, the amount of attorney time expended by the plaintiffs begins to look more reasonable, not less.
D. Use of “block-billing.”
In its decision, the district court quite appropriately expressed concern about the use of “block billing” practices.9 The use of billing practices that camouflage the work a lawyer does naturally and quite correctly raise suspicions about whether all the work claimed was actually accomplished or whether it was necessary. This concern is particularly important in a situation where a party is seeking to have his opponent pay for Ms own lawyer’s work. As we noted in Jane L., a district court does not abuse its discretion in reducing a plaintiffs fee request when the request is based on time records that are [1285]*1285“rather sloppy and imprecise.” Jane L., 61 F.3d at 1510. We have always required lawyers to keep “meticulous time records that ‘reveal ... all hours for which compensation is requested and how those hours were allotted to specific tasks.’ ” Id. (quoting Ramos, 713 F.2d at 553).
In this case, however, the record before us demonstrates that the district court clearly erred when it found that the plaintiffs’ lawyer had engaged in “block billing.” In their initial application for attorney’s fees, the plaintiffs submitted billing statements from their lawyer that itemized what tasks he performed in the case on each day, with a total amount of time billed for each day. The summaries of the tasks are quite specific, and they go beyond the kind of imprecision we criticized in Jane L. It is true, however, that these billing statements do not allocate the precise amounts of time spent on each particular task during each individual day. However, in their response to the defendants’ objection to the fee request, the plaintiffs supplemented these billing statements with copies of the actual contemporaneous time slips that were the basis of the billing statements. These time slips do include the specific amounts of time allocated to each individual task.
On the basis of these records, it is clear that the plaintiffs’ lawyer did not engage in “block billing.” If the district court is concerned about identifying certain tasks that it felt were redundant or unnecessary, it had information sufficient to calculate how much time was spent on those tasks. Thus, the court’s contention that it was “not possible” to identify which hours were “excessive or duplicative”10 is not supported by the record. On the other hand, the district court might properly be concerned about the difficulty of performing a meaningful analysis given the mass of records submitted to it. On remand, the district court may quite properly impose on the claimant the burden of organizing or summarizing the billing records in such a manner as to facilitate judicial review of the reasonableness of the claim for attorneys’ fees.11
E. Defendants’ failure to challenge portion of requested fee.
The court's award dropped the fee request from the $186,008.75 presented by the plaintiffs, and the $140,316.25 left uncontested by the defendants, to $105,720.89. The end result was a fee award that was nearly 25 percent below the unrebutted amount of the plaintiffs’ fee request (and 43 percent below the original plaintiffs’ request).
Of course, there is no question that a district court may rely on its general experience as well as its closer familiarity with a [1286]*1286case to evaluate the parties’ arguments on a fees issue. See Bee v. Greaves, 910 F.2d 686, 689 (10th Cir.1990). In this respect, a district court may well decide to go below the amount of a fee request put in controversy by the parties — in this sense, the court’s discretion is not absolutely constrained by the amount of a fee request put in controversy by the parties. But cf. Cunningham v. City of McKeesport, 763 F.2d 262, 267 (3d Cir.1985) (holding that under the Third Circuit’s approach, a district court has no reason to disregard uncontested affidavits filed by the fee applicant when the defendant chose not to put those amounts in controversy), vacated 478 U.S. 1015, 106 S.Ct. 3324, 92 L.Ed.2d 731 (1986), reinstated after remand, 807 F.2d 49 (3d Cir.1986). However, the fact that the district court here chose to depart significantly from the unchallenged portion of the plaintiffs’ fee request, and did so only by applying a blanket reduction ratio, is a factor to consider in deciding whether the district court abused its discretion in the magnitude of the cuts ordered.
II. Hearing on fees request
As an independent challenge to the district court’s decision, the plaintiffs contend that the court abused its discretion by failing to hold an evidentiary hearing on the attorneys fees issue and then relying on a rationale — i.e. the “fairly simple” nature of the case — that was not articulated in the defendants’ briefs. This claim has no merit because the plaintiffs have been unable to point to any indication in the record that they requested a hearing. Ordinarily, a district court does not abuse its discretion in deciding not to hold an evidentiary hearing when no such request is ever made. Furthermore, many courts have long accepted the proposition that there is no need for an evidentiary hearing in a attorney’s fees case when a record has been fully developed through briefs, affidavits, and depositions. See Derf-ner & Wolf, supra, ¶ 18.06[4][a] (collecting cases).
In this ease, the plaintiffs have failed to show that any new information they would have presented at the hearing would have been critical to the district court’s consideration.12 A district court does not abuse its discretion when it fails to hold a hearing at which the parties will simply reiterate arguments they already have made in their briefs.
The case relied upon by the plaintiffs for their argument on this point is inapposite. See Michael A. Cramer, MAI, SRPA, Inc. v. United States, 47 F.3d 379, 380-81 (10th Cir.1995). The Cramer case involved a decision by a district court to deny a fee request just three days after the defendant had filed its opposition to the request and before the plaintiff had a chance to respond to the defendant’s arguments. Id. In that posture, we held that the district court’s failure to supplement the record was an abuse of discretion. See id. at 384. We do not have a similar problem in this case because the record the parties created was quite adequate to resolve the fees issue.
Conclusion
We REVERSE and REMAND. On remand, the district court should redetermine a reasonable attorney’s fee under 42 U.S.C. § 1988(b) consistent with this opinion.