A recent Legal Intelligencer story, “$1.5M in Attorney Fees Awarded in Diet Drug Cases,” reports that a federal judge has awarded $1.5 million to a law firm representing plaintiffs in the diet drug class action as well as the ­multidistrict litigation in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

Additionally, U.S. District Judge Harvey Bartle III of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania authorized a roughly $13,000 reimbursement for out-of-pocket expenses incurred by Levin, Fishbein, Sedran, & Berman, co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs, for out-of-pocket expenses in litigating the case.

According to Bartle's memorandum, the fees were awarded for 1,305 hours—or 168 eight-hour workdays—of common benefit work in the litigation from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31, 2015.  The money will come from the cost and fees account of the litigation settlement fund.  There were no objections to awarding attorney fees to the firm.

The firm is being paid $750,000 for work performed in the class action and an ­additional $750,000 for work performed in the MDL.  The total amount of the settlement fund was $6.44 billion, according to Bartle, to compensate thousands of individual class members who took the diet-drug cocktail commonly called Fen-Phen.  The litigation commenced in 1997.

Michael Fishbein of the firm served as class counsel with respect to the settlement agreement and co-chairman of the plaintiffs management committee.  "We have routinely applied every year for fees, so this represents the latest application on our part.  Most likely it'll be the last application for the MDL side," Fishbein said.

Fishbein noted that class action claims are still being administered so there is still work to be done on that front.

Bartle wrote that Levin Fishbein assisted 340 claimants in receiving benefits in 2015.  The firm continued to take part in trust planning, budgeting and operational ­planning in 2015, Bartle said.

Also, "Levin Fishbein continues to ­undertake many complex matters within this litigation," Bartle said.  "We have recognized, however, that the class action administration and MDL 1203 are in their sunset period and that the number of ­individuals who benefited from the settlement agreement in 2015 has declined considerably when compared with earlier years."

That factor had to be taken into consideration when determining the appropriate fee award, Bartle said.  The amount of fees requested amounted to 0.0117 percent of the total settlement fund, Bartle said, and roughly 8 percent of the $9.4 million awarded to plaintiffs in 2015, within the 4 to 15 percent attorney compensation range for fees awarded in similar cases.