A recent American Lawyer story by Roy Strom, “High-Powered Plaintiff’s Lawyers Battle Over Fees in NCAA Concussion Case,” reports that a group of prominent plaintiff’s lawyers are battling for their cut of potentially $21 million in legal fees related to a pending concussion settlement with the National Collegiate Athletic Association, one of the many litigation battles that the governing body for collegiate sports now faces.  The dispute between Chicago-based Jay Edelson and Steve Berman, a co-founder of Seattle-based plaintiffs powerhouse Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, began as a strategy disagreement as late as 2014.

That’s when an Edelson client objected to a class action settlement led by Berman’s firm and others that would have the NCAA create a $70 million medical monitoring program for current and former college athletes, as well as put $5 million toward concussion research.  Edelson’s objection sought to preserve personal injury claims on behalf of former student athletes in a variety of sports, including football.

As part of the settlement, the lead counsel at Hagens Berman and Joseph Siprut, the founder and managing partner of Chicago’s Siprut PC requested $15 million in fees for themselves and about 10 other firms.  The fee request was made in January with the firms stating that they had worked 18,000 hours on the case and reached 4.2 million people to alert them to a preliminary approval of a settlement in July 2016.

Edelson’s firm objected to that amount last week in a court filing that takes aim at various aspects of the lead counsels’ work and argues for no more than $8 million in fees to be awarded to Hagens Berman and Siprut.  The Edelson objection states that the requested fees, which represent 21 percent of the amount of the settlement, are too high.  It also argues the lead counsels’ request takes credit for $50 million in settlement value that Edelson claims his objector added when a judge agreed to knock out a “reversion” provision that would have returned to the NCAA unused money in the concussion monitoring program.

Berman’s firm, which is disputing Edelson’s request for $6 million in fees, argues the reversion provision would not have added anything close to $50 million in value to the settlement and that U.S. District Judge John Zee decided to knock it out of the deal for reasons that had little to do with Edelson’s objections.

Edelson’s firm had originally sparred with the lead counsels’ tactics in the case by saying they were not providing monetary benefits for potentially injured college athletes.  Unlike the National Football League’s $1 billion class action settlement with retired players, which continues to have its own unique issues ahead of resolution, the NCAA’s accord does not provide a fund to compensate injured athletes.

Fearing the settlement would bar athletes from pursuing personal injury claims, Edelson objected to create a “carve-out” for those claims.  His firm, working with Sol Weiss of Philadelphia’s Anapol Weiss, is now leading a series of nearly 50 class action suits on behalf of athletes who played the same sport at the same school.  For instance, the widow of a former University of Texas football player is the named plaintiff in a class action on behalf of all Longhorns football players who played between 1952 to 2010.

In a filing last week, Berman’s firm argues that Edelson’s firm should receive fees in the NCAA settlement case that represent a “pro rata portion” of his fees tied to the issue of arguing for a personal-injury carve out in the case.  That amount would be something less than $1.4 million.

Mark Mester, global chair of the consumer class action practice at Latham & Watkins in Chicago, is representing the NCAA in the litigation. The Indianapolis-based organization paid nearly $8.2 million to Latham—and another $5.8 million to Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom—during 2014-15, according to the NCAA’s most recent federal tax filing.