Alison Frankel wrote about HLLI’s successful appeal of a $3.2 million attorneys’ fee award in the Wawa Data Security settlement, where the district court awarded attorneys fees that exceed class recovery:
The fee award challenge, you will not be surprised to hear, was brought by objector Ted Frank of the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, who was represented at the 3rd Circuit by his colleague Adam Schulman. Frank and Schulman’s appellate brief asked the 3rd Circuit to establish a bright-line rule that fee awards in class actions must be based on class members’ actual recovery, not on the “abstract fiction” of an available fund that relatively few class members will actually claim any money from.
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If plaintiffs’ lawyers once again ask for a fat fee award, Frank told me by email, he will renew his objection.
He maintains that unless courts specifically require trial judges to base class counsel fees on the class payout, lower-court judges will continue to find reasons to approve fee awards that Frank considers to be unreasonable.
“If there’s ultimately a circuit split because of the lack of a bright line rule, we will take that up,” Frank said.