A recent The Recorder story, “After Uber Picks Fee Fight, Plaintiffs Firms Fire Back,” reports that lawyers representing blind Uber riders in a discrimination lawsuit responded forcefully to claims that they ran up bills on a case that was poised for settlement in order to score a windfall fee award.

As part of a settlement announced in April, Uber agreed to deactivate drivers who refuse to pick up blind passengers and revamp the way it deals with complaints from passengers with service animals.  Lawyers at Disability Rights Advocates, Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld and the TRE Legal Practice who handled the case on behalf of the plaintiffs have requested more than $3 million in attorney fees and costs.

But earlier this month, Uber's lawyers at Littler Mendelson asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Nathanael Cousins, who has overseen the case, to slash the plaintiffs' attorney fees to less than $450,000, claiming that even when settlement was imminent plaintiffs' attorneys larded their bills with extra time preparing for trial and discovery battles.

In court papers, Rosen Bien's Ernest Galvan called Uber's fee objections a "superficial mechanical critique."  "Simultaneously advancing settlement and litigation is not a way of increasing fees.  It is a way of diligently prosecuting the action," Galvan wrote.  "Declining to prosecute the action because of settlement talks would have been an irresponsible litigation strategy and might have rendered plaintiffs' counsel inadequate class counsel," he wrote.

Galvan wrote that an expert hired by Uber to audit the billing records of plaintiffs' attorneys made "careless" mistakes resulting in $214,000 in suggested cuts that double- and triple-counted Uber's objections.  He also contended that the expert inappropriately compared the plaintiff team's rates to national rates for similar work, rather than taking into account going rates in the Bay Area, and looked at fees from labor and employment cases instead of other civil rights matters.  Additionally, Galvan wrote that Uber dramatically overstated the ratio of plaintiffs hours spent on the case compared with defense hours worked by failing to include 600 hours of work by in-house lawyers at Uber in its calculations.