A recent Courthouse News Service story, “Foreign Attorney Sue for Share of $100M Fee” reports that Argentinean attorneys claim a Miami law firm stiffed them for a 23 percent consulting fee from a $410 million consumer class action settlement “and one of the largest attorney’s fee awards in such a case, over $100 million.”  Raponi & Hunter Abogados claim Jeremy Alters of Alters Morelli Ranter “sold off or assigned interests in the recovery from the class action lawsuits to fund his law firm and lavish lifestyle.”

The underlying class action involved U.S. banks’ chronologically rearranging debit transactions from largest to smallest, to generate “billions of additional overdraft fees.”  According to the Argentinean partners, Osvaldo Raponi and Jaime Hunter, In August 2008, Raponi, and expert in banking law, and Hunter, bought to Alters and his firm the most significant case in Alters’ legal career.  This was the first consumer banking class action in which Alters or his firm were involved.  Raponi and his firm were the architects of the claims bought by Alters, which resulted in one of the largest consumer class action settlements in history, $410 million and one of the largest fee awards in such a case, $100 million.

Alters acknowledges that Raponi consulted in the overdraft case in a “meaningful way that deserves compensation for his work and that he has done work, a lot of it.”  In exchange for originating the case and providing his assistance, Alters agreed that Raponi and Hunter would receive 23 percent of his firms’ fee from the litigation.  Years later, after the Bank of America case settled, Alters betrayed Raponi and Hunter and misrepresented that the fee agreement was unenforceable and that they could receive  a mere fraction of the agreed upon fee as “consultants,” not as foreign lawyers, or they would receive  nothing at all.