A group of plaintiffs' lawyers have asked a San Francisco federal judge to allow it to claim more than $225 million in legal fees and costs as their reward for work on a class action lawsuit against Google for allegedly secretly tracking users' supposedly secure 'Icognito' web browsing activities.
According to court documents, the settlement ending that class action is estimated by lawyers to be worth more than $5 billion. The settlement, unveiled in a filing in court on April 1, would require Google to rewrite its consumer disclosures to more clearly state how it will track, log and handle user activity data.
Further, the settlement will require Google to delete "billions of data records" collected from people allegedly browsing the web while using Google's Icognito mode, which consumers were allegedly led to believe prevented anyone from tracking their movements online.
And Google will be required to remove four "private browsing detection bits" that Google alleged used "to track a user's decision to browse privately, and then label the data collected as private."
"The Settlement puts a stop to this practice once and for all," the plaintiffs' lawyers said.
The plaintiffs' lawyers estimate these changes will cost Google more than $500 million per year in lost global annual revenue, based on losses Google has already allegedly suffered after their own "third-party cookies" were blocked from collecting data from Icognito users.
Unlike many other privacy class action settlements, however, the Google Icognito deal will not include any direct payments to Google users. Federal appeals judges in 2023 rejected plaintiffs' request to allow them to pursue money damages on behalf of potentially many millions of people.
Rather, under the settlement, any consumers seeking to get paid by Google for violating their rights under the law will need to submit individual claims through arbitration, potentially complicating their ability to collect.
The lawsuit has been pending in federal court in the Northern District of California since 2020. At that time, attorneys with the firm of Boies Schiller Flexner, of San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, first filed suit, accusing Google of violating privacy laws and California consumer protection laws by keeping tabs on people's online activities, even when using Google's supposedly secure and secret Icognito browsing mode.
Boies Schiller was joined in the action by attorneys with the firms of Susman Godfrey LLP, of New York, and Morgan & Morgan, of Tampa, Florida.
According to settlement documents, the plaintiffs' lawyers assert their years of work on the case and the results of the action justify their huge fee request. They repeatedly noted Google fought their lawsuit with "scorched earth" legal tactics, making the proceedings and evidence discovery efforts "unnecessarily contentious" for years.
"The settlement addresses the past, present, and future, providing immediate and substantial benefits to every class member, including deletion of private browsing data, restrictions on how Google stores data, changes to Google’s disclosures, and limits on what Google may collect going forward. By any metric, the settlement is a win for the approximately 136 million class members whose data was illegally collected, stored, and used," the plaintiffs' lawyers said in a motion for attorney fees, filed April 23.
The plaintiffs' lawyers said under the traditional method of calculating their fees, their billing would amount to over $62 million. But they asserted they should be allowed to multiply those fees by 3.5, to account for their extensive work on the case.
They noted Google will likely oppose the "multiplier" request, and will note the class action did not result in any payment of money damages from Google to class members.
However, they say the multiplier is still owed and is in line with other large class action settlements.
The plaintiffs' lawyers also requested more than $7 million in costs to be reimbursed.
A judge has not yet ruled on the settlement or the fee request.
Plaintiffs are represented by attorneys Mark C. Mao and Bebko Reblitz-Richardson, of Boies Schiller Flexner, of San Francisco; Bill Carmody and Shawn J. Rabin, of Susman Godfrey, of New York; and John A. Yanchunis and Ryan J. McGee, of Morgan & Morgan, of Tampa, Florida.
Google is represented by attorneys Andrew H. Schapiro, Stephen A. Broome, Viola Trebicka and Diane M. Doolittle, of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, of Chicago, Los Angeles and Redwood Shores, California.