ANN ARBOR, Mich. (Legal Newsline) - Plaintiff lawyers who negotiated a $640 million settlement with the State of Michigan and other defendants over the Flint water crisis have asked the court for a third of the money as fees, representing a potential payoff of more than $1,000 an hour for some lawyers.
Plaintiff firms led by Cohen Milstein, Levy Konigsberg, Napoli Shkolnik and Weitz & Luxenberg wrested control of the litigation soon after engineering mistakes by the city of Flint left its municipal water system laced with lead that leached from aging undergound pipes.
In a court filing Monday, those firms said they achieved a “remarkable result” that deserves “fair and reasonable compensation.” They asked the court to award the lead attorneys 6.33% of the fund as a common-benefit fee to compensate them for legal work that supported the claims of all plaintiffs. They also proposed paying themselves 27% of the remaining funds for a total rate of 31.6%, plus $7.2 million in expenses.
The law firms said they expended 182,571 hours on common-benefit work on the cases, for a “lodestar” or hypothetical market fee of more than $60 million at rates of some $570 an hour. If the court awards them the full fee they are seeking, they would earn $40.6 million from the common-benefit fee charged to all claimants, but would also claim a large share of the 27% contingency fee subtracted from each award.
The total fees collected by lawyers in the case would exceed $202 million, the law firms said.
“The requested fees amounting to a maximum of 31.6% of the Settlement Fund are reasonable in light of the value of Plaintiffs’ Counsel’s time on an hourly basis,” they said.
The bulk of the money will be paid out by the state of Michigan, meaning Michigan taxpayers would be funding more than $200 million in fees for private lawyers for the work of negotiating a settlement on behalf of Flint residents and businesses with the state.
The lawyers also propose penalizing lawyers who joined the litigation late in the game, by limiting fees on clients signed up after July 16, 2020 to 10%, with another 17% going to the lead lawyers.