The trial court did not abuse its discretion in denying plaintiff’s motion for an attorney fee award on the ground that neither party had prevailed in the action. Plaintiff tenant sued his landlord, asked the jury to award him $200,000 but recovered a jury verdict of only $6,450. In view of plaintiff’s recovery of such a small percentage of the requested damages it was not an abuse of discretion for the trial court to conclude that plaintiff had not achieved a simple, unqualified victory and that the case had resulted in a tie. Moreover, plaintiff ignored the unlawful detainer action which the landlord had brought against him. That action should have been consolidated with this suit upon the parties’ filing a required notice of related case, which both parties inexplicably failed to file. In the unlawful detainer action, the landlord recovered more than twice the tenant’s recovery in this action. It was not an abuse of discretion to combine the two actions for purposes of assessing the prevailing party since they both grew out of the same dispute and should have been consolidated. In the combined cases, the tenant was the net loser, and so not a prevailing party.