By David Thomas
April 24 (Reuters) - Three U.S. law firms that spearheaded a browser data privacy class action against Alphabet's Google and reached a settlement earlier this month have asked a judge to award them $217.6 million in attorney fees.
The firms, Boies Schiller Flexner, Morgan & Morgan and Susman Godfrey, have estimated the value of the settlement as up to $7.8 billion. Google is not paying damages as part of the accord, but it may be sued by individual users.
Google has denied wrongdoing but agreed to destroy billions of data records in the settlement, which would resolve claims that it secretly tracked the internet use of people who thought they were browsing privately. The agreement and attorney fee award are subject to approval by a federal judge in Oakland, California.
The plaintiffs lawyers' Tuesday filings offer an updated glimpse at the billing rates of prominent attorneys including Boies Schiller founder David Boies, showing Boies' rate has increased to $2,330 from the $2,110 rate he disclosed in an unrelated case in September.
Bill Carmody, a partner at Susman Godfrey whose past clients have included WeWork founder Adam Neumann, is now billing at $2,500 an hour, according to the filings.
Carmody said in an email his firm makes "periodic adjustments" to its hourly rates "based on trends in the legal marketplace and what’s appropriate for our cases and clients." A spokesperson for Boies did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The lawyers told the court Tuesday that their $218 million fee request is 3.5 times the plaintiffs' team's actual time expenditures in the case, which they argued was fair and reasonable.
"Class Counsel squared off against a large team from Quinn Emanuel, one of the largest and most expensive law firms in the world, where associates routinely bill over $1,000 per hour," the firms said in their fee request.
A Quinn Emanuel spokesperson deferred to Google for any comment, and a spokesperson for Google did not immediately respond to a comment request.
Responses to the plaintiffs lawyers' fee request are due by June 7, and a hearing on the request before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has been set for Aug. 7.
The case is Chasom Brown, et al., v. Google LLC, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, 4:20-cv-03664.
For plaintiffs: David Boies, Mark Mao, Beko Reblitz-Richardson, James Lee, Rossana Baeza, Alison Anderson and Logan Wright of Boies Schiller Flexner; Bill Carmody, Shawn Rabin, Steven Shepard, Alexander Frawley and Amanda Bonn, of Susman Godfrey; and John Yanchunis, Ryan McGee and Michael Ram, of Morgan & Morgan
For Google: Andrew Schapiro, Teuta Fani, Joseph Margolies, Diane Doolittle, Sara Jenkins, Stephen Broome, Viola Trebicka, Crystal Nix-Hines, Rachael McCracken, Alyssa Olson, Jomaire Crawford, Carl Spilly and Jonathan Tse, of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan
(Reporting by David Thomas)
((D.Thomas@thomsonreuters.com;))
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