A recent CBSSports.com story, “NCAA Wants O’Bannon Fees Reduced by at Least $41.7 Million,” reports that the NCAA wants a federal judge to reduce the Ed O’Bannon plaintiffs’ fee request from $50.2 million in attorney fees and expenses to approximately $8.5 million, according to court documents.
In October, O’Bannon lawyers filed a motion seeking $44,972,406 in attorney fees and $5,277,209 in recoverable costs from the NCAA. They also sought “an upward adjustment” of the final fee award amount because the litigation “carried an exceptional risk of defeated and required tremendous amount of time and labor that in turn precluded other employment.”
The NCAA wants the attorney fees to be reduced by at least $36,864,238 and the requested costs by at least $4,916,282. The NCAA claims the O’Bannon lawyers “impermissibly syndicated the case for its own financial gain with an unwieldy network of at least 34 firms. Many of them did very little work and added very little of substance, but padded the lodestar by billing thousands of hours of useless time.”
In its fee challenge, the NCAA requested the following hours be deducted from the O’Bannon victory:
All hours before the plaintiffs filed a new class certification motion on Aug. 31, 2012, with what the NCAA describes as a new theory in the case related to live TV. The lawsuit was initially filed in July 2009, meaning the NCAA wants a reduction in $23.1 million in billable hours filed by the plaintiffs.
80 percent of the hours between Sept. 1, 2012, and Nov. 8, 2015, which is the date when U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken denied the plaintiffs’ attempt to certify a damages class.
All hours after Nov. 8, 2013 related to damages, group licensing to broadcast, products such as jersey or trading cards, monitoring the related Sam Keller video game lawsuit.
Reducing the overall reduction of requested fees by 50 percent because of the plaintiffs “limited success.”
As an example of unnecessary expenses, the NCAA cited O’Bannon’s lawyers billing 861.5 hours and $389,972 to have attorneys at four different firms prepare for the deposition of former NCAA vice president Greg Shaheen. Four separate timekeepers at four different firms then collectively billed $28,181 to summarize the deposition, the NCAA wrote.
“The value of succeeding should be measured in multiples of the value it cost the NCAA to lose,” O’Bannon lead attorney Michael Hausfeld said. “How many people did they have working on their case and what did it cost them to lose? Why don’t they produce what they spent? What the NCAA owes for losing is, in their terms, just the cost of doing bad business.”