By Sara Merken
Plaintiffs' lawyers have asked a San Francisco federal judge to award more than $181 million in legal fees as part of a $725 million data privacy settlement with Facebook parent company Meta Platforms resolving claims over sharing of user information with third parties.
Co-lead counsel at plaintiffs law firms Keller Rohrback and Bleichmar Fonti & Auld said in a motion filed late Wednesday the fees would represent 25% of the settlement fund which is "within the range awarded in comparably sized cases."
The lawyers said the $725 million settlement is the largest data-privacy recovery in history and the largest private settlement Facebook has ever agreed to. "Nothing about this unprecedented result came easily or quickly," Derek Loeser of Keller Rohrback and Lesley Weaver of Bleichmar Fonti & Auld wrote in the filing.
Class counsel worked more than 149,000 hours on the case over nearly five years of "intense litigation," they said.
The plaintiffs lawyers, Meta and an outside lawyer for the company from Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the fee request on Thursday.
While a 25% fee amounts to $181,250,000, the fees paid from the settlement fund would be about $180,449,782, the lawyers wrote. The company and its outside law firm, Gibson Dunn, already paid about $800,217 in sanctions, which can be deducted from the total fees, they wrote.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in February ordered Meta and Gibson Dunn to pay about $925,000, which included fees and costs, over what he said was an effort to make the litigation unnecessarily difficult and expensive for the plaintiffs.
The long-running lawsuit was sparked by revelations in 2018 that Facebook had allowed British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to access data of as many as 87 million users.
The company did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement, which the judge granted preliminary approval of in March. A final approval hearing is scheduled for Sept. 7.
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(Reporting by Sara Merken; editing by Leigh Jones)
