Attorneys who negotiated a $725 million settlement with Facebook to end data privacy litigation have formally requested more than $181 in legal fees, about 25% of the total pool.
On March 29, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria granted preliminary approval to what is billed as the largest data privacy class action settlement in U.S. history. He appointed attorneys Derek W. Loeser, of the firm of Keller Rohrback LLP, of Seattle, and Lesley E. Weaver, of the Bleichmar Fonti & Auld firm, of Oakland, as class counsel.
In a motion filed June 21, the firms said they spent almost 150,000 hours on the case “over nearly five years of intense litigation” and incurred more than $4.1 million in expenses. In arguing the reasonableness of a 25% award, the firms submitted analysis showing the average fee award for large privacy settlements is 22% and that, outside of securities law, more than half of settlements between $500 million and $1 billion have hard awards greater than 25%.
The class actions, filed in various locales, were consolidated by the federal courts and transferred to Judge Chhabria in the Northern District of California. The lawsuits, filed in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, asserted Facebook’s policies allowed third-party app operators — notably data mining firm Cambridge Analytica — to collect and exploit user information to target users with posts and ads. Cambridge was particularly accused of using data mining practices to aid the 2016 campaign of former President Donald Trump.
The lawsuits claimed Facebook, now known as Meta, violated its contract with users by allegedly allowing third parties to obtain and use their data; that Facebook’s actions allegedly violated the federal Video Privacy Protection Act and the Stored Communications Act; and that Facebook was negligent and committed various personal privacy torts by allowing for “public disclosure of private facts,” including violations of the right to privacy under the California state constitution, among others.
“Between December 2021 and August 2022, class counsel deposed 47 individuals and conducted more than 306 hours of depositions on 54 days, resulting in more than 13,250 pages of testimony, and marked more than 700 exhibits,” according to the motion. “This included 34 fact depositions of current and former Facebook employees … Depositions of Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and current COO Javier Olivan were a few weeks away when the parties notified the Court of their settlement in principle.”
Eight named plaintiffs are in line for $15,000 service awards. The lawyers said these plaintiffs “invested over 100 hours of time each to respond to 100 interrogatories and dozens of requests for admission and requests for production from Facebook, and sat for 49 hours of often invasive deposition testimony.”
It is not known how much money individual Facebook users may expect from the deal. But based on past history, the amount likely may not exceed $10 per person. In the motion for settlement, the plaintiffs estimated the deal could cover as many as 250 million to 280 million people in the U.S., including everyone who was a Facebook user in the U.S. from May 2007 to December 2022. To receive a cut of the funds, Facebook users will need to submit a valid claim for review.
The attorneys’ formal request for 25% of the total settlement pool and the $4.1 million in expenses allows a subtraction of more than $1 million because Facebook’s attorneys — from the firm of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher — have already paid sanctions and expenses for allegedly engaging in practices the court determined improperly prolonged the proceedings.