SAN JOSE, Calif. (Legal Newsline) – Lawyers are asking for more than $21 million for scoring a settlement that refunds Zoom customers up to 15% of the money they paid for their subscriptions while the company had alleged privacy concerns.
Despite Zoom’s argument that numerous class actions were filed “under a scattershot array of loosely related factual and legal theories, largely drawn from sensationalist news reports,” court documents filed in the resulting multidistrict litigation in San Jose federal court show the company has agreed to pay $85 million to settle those claims.
Interim co-lead counsel Ahdoot & Wolfson of Burbank, Calif., and Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy of Burlingame, Calif., say they will ask for 25% of the recovery as fees - $21.25 million.
“Zoom collected approximately $1.3 billion in Zoom Meetings subscriptions from class members who paid for the subscription,” the notice of settlement says.
“The time period during which this revenue was collected includes when Zoom claims to have corrected its alleged E2EE misrepresentations (in April 2020) as well as when it allegedly switched to true E2EE (Oct. 14, 2020, after its acquisition of Keybase).
“Nevertheless, the settlement fund amount of $85 million represents approximately 6.16% of the maximum total revenues collected based on the allegedly unlawful practices, and is reasonable in light of the significant risks of litigation.”
Lawsuits following Zoom’s rise to popularity thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic alleged negligence and violation of laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act.
They said Zoom shared the user's personal information, including the type of device and software the user has as well as their network carrier and location, with third parties such as Facebook.
The lawsuits also claim Zoom misrepresented its encryption protocols and failed to prevent unwanted users from crashing meetings (called “Zoombombing”).
But the plaintiffs don’t allege they were harmed by the sharing of any data, Zoom says, nor do they allege they ever relied upon any specific Zoom representations about encryption.
Judge Lucy Koh will either approve or deny the proposed settlement and the attorneys fees request. She approved the Ahdoot and Cotchett firms as lead counsel after receiving applications from nine firms.