A recent Law 360 story by Dorothy Atkins, “CORRECTION: Facebook Users’ Attys Seek $185M in $725M Meta Privacy Deal”, reports that counsel representing a preliminarily certified class of more than 200 million Facebook users asked a California federal judge to award them $181.25 million in fees and $4.1 million in costs for securing a $725 million deal to resolve privacy claims over the Cambridge Analytica data harvesting scandal.

In a 40-page motion, class counsel told U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria that although the case in many ways raised novel and "unprecedented" legal questions regarding privacy laws, the $181.25 million attorney fee request, which represents 25% of the total settlement, is in line with other mega settlements, which have awarded an average of 22% in fees, according to the class' expert.  The class' expert also determined that large non-securities class action settlements in the $500 million to $1 billion range have average fee awards of 20.3% and a quarter of those deals have awarded attorney fees greater than 20.3%, according to the motion.

The motion additionally notes that the requested fee amount represents a 1.99 lodestar multiplier for roughly 150,000 hours of attorney work done over the past five years. That multiplier is well below the average 3.2 multiplier for typical fee requests, the motion says.  "Thus, in these circumstances, class counsel respectfully submit that their request for 25% of the common fund, though substantial, is justified," the motion says.  "The unprecedented size of the settlement is the product of class counsel's concentrated and successful efforts, and their requested fee reflects the scale of that effort and the risks they have borne for years."

The proposed nine-figure deal seeks to end litigation launched after the March 2018 revelation that a third-party app developer had taken personal data from roughly 87 million unsuspecting users of the popular social media platform Facebook and later sold the data to Cambridge Analytica, a U.K.-based political consulting firm hired by former President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign.  Cambridge Analytica filed for bankruptcy shortly after the scandal came to light and Facebook Inc. has since changed its name to Meta Platforms Inc.

After years of hotly contested litigation and heated discovery battles, the parties struck a settlement in principle in August, as Facebook users sought hefty sanctions against Facebook and its counsel Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP for alleged discovery misconduct.  During a hearing on the sanctions bid in September, the judge ordered the parties to file briefs on how a sanctions award would affect class counsel's attorney fee request and proposed settlement.

In March, Judge Chhabria tentatively signed off on the proposed settlement, which creates a nonreversionary settlement fund of $725 million to compensate eligible members of the settlement class. The class includes all Facebook users in the U.S. between May 2007 and December 2022, an estimated 250 million to 280 million people.

The parties asked the judge to award class counsel $181.25 million in fees, which they noted is equal to their $91.2 million lodestar multiplied by 1.99, as well as $15,000 to each class representative.  They also clarified in a footnote that the settlement fund would only pay $180.4 million in fees, because the fee amount would be reduced by roughly $800,000 already paid as sanctions.