By David Thomas
Dec 19 (Reuters) - U.S. courts awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees to class action lawyers and other attorneys in 2024, with hundreds of millions more still hanging in the balance in 2025.
Here are some of the largest awards and outstanding fee bids heading into the new year.
— Two of the biggest attorney paydays of the year came in a sprawling 12-year antitrust litigation over claims that health insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield overcharged subscribers and underpaid healthcare providers.
The U.S. Supreme Court in June declined to hear a challenge to $667 million in fees awarded to lawyers at Boies Schiller Flexner, Hausfeld and other law firms that secured a $2.7 billion antitrust settlement with the insurer in 2020.
Another set of plaintiffs lawyers, led by Joe Whatley and Edith Kallas of Whatley Kallas, are set to request up to $700 million for their work on a separate $2.8 billion settlement that Blue Cross reached in October.
A federal judge in Birmingham, Alabama tentatively approved the $2.8 billion settlement earlier this month. Blue Cross denied wrongdoing.
Whatley Kallas represented hospitals and other health care providers in the cases. Boies Schiller and Hausfeld represented commercial and individual subscribers.
— Winston & Strawn and Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro are seeking more than $515 million in legal fees after negotiating a landmark multibillion-dollar settlement with the National Collegiate Athletic Association over pay restrictions for student athletes.
The proposed settlement includes payments to former college athletes worth about $2.7 billion and also includes provisions for future athletes to be compensated. The future payments could lead to another $200 million or more in additional legal fee awards for Winston and Hagens Berman over the next 10 years.
The settlement would resolve antitrust lawsuits over longstanding NCAA rules that prohibited payments to athletes, including restrictions on compensation for competing, for the commercial use of players' names, images and likenesses, and payments tied to athletes' academic achievements.
— A federal judge in November said she would continue to set aside more than half a billion dollars for a group of plaintiffs law firms after 3M MMM.N agreed to pay $6.01 billion to settle the largest mass tort litigation in U.S. history.
The court and the lawyers who worked on the case still have to decide how to distribute about $540 million in legal fees. Lawyers from more than 60 law firms said they spent 364,000 hours working on the case, including 16 trials.
3M agreed to the settlement last August, resolving claims that flaws with the company's earplugs caused hearing damage in hundreds of thousands of U.S. service members and veterans. 3M has said its earplugs are safe and effective and denied allegations that they caused hearing loss.
— A Delaware state judge earlier this month awarded $345 million to lawyers who successfully sued to void Tesla TSLA.O founder Elon Musk's $56 billion pay package, but the final fate of the award is still unsettled.
Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick last week cleared the way for Musk and Tesla to file appeals to try to reinstate his pay package. Tesla will also be able to appeal the $345 million fee award, the largest ever in Delaware.
The law firms who spearheaded the lawsuit against Tesla — Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann, Andrews & Springer and Friedman Oster & Tejtel — initially sought more than 29 million Tesla shares, valued at billions of dollars, as a fee award. McCormick rejected the request.
— Delaware's highest court in August upheld a $267 million fee award for five law firms that obtained a $1 billion settlement for Dell Technologies DELL.N shareholders.
The fee is one of the largest ever for U.S. shareholder litigation. But the Delaware Supreme Court said it was not an improper windfall to the law firms who represented the plaintiffs — Labaton Keller Sucharow, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, Andrews & Springer, Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd and Friedman Oster & Tejtel.
The plaintiffs alleged they were short-changed in a controversial $23.9 billion transaction in 2018 that marked Dell's return as a publicly traded company. Dell had denied wrongdoing.
(Legal Fee Tracker is a weekly feature exploring attorney compensation awards and disputes in class actions, bankruptcies and other matters. Please send tips or suggestions to D.Thomas@thomsonreuters.com)
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(Reporting by David Thomas)
((D.Thomas@thomsonreuters.com;))
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