A recent Law 360 story by Pete Brush, “Judge OKs $187M Libor Deals Calls $54M Atty Fee ‘High’,” reports that a Manhattan federal judge approved $187 million of settlements between seven megabanks — including Deutsche Bank — and futures traders who say big banks rigged a global rate, but she indicated that a roughly $54 million fee request from plaintiffs' lawyers was too high.  U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald said the fee request from Lovell Stewart Halebian Jacobson LLP and Kirby McInerney LLP, which helmed the litigation on behalf of a settlement class led by trading firms including Metzler Asset Management and Atlantic Trading USA, was "high" and seemed to represent inefficiencies.

Investors who dealt in Eurodollars futures or options on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange are in line for a cut of the settlements in the 2011 lawsuit, which alleges that seven settling banks and others — like UBS AG and Rabobank, who have not settled — conspired to violate the Sherman Act as a group and violated the Commodity Exchange Act individually by gaming the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR).

Joining Deutsche Bank, which is paying the most into the $187 million settlement bucket with $80 million, are Citibank, Barclays, JPMorgan & Chase, Bank of America, HSBC and Societe Generale.  Judge Buchwald preliminarily approved the seven banks' settlements in March.  "I have no problem with the settlement," the judge said — especially, she added, with large swaths of the nine-year-old case on "life support."

Plaintiffs' counsel David Kovel of Kirby McInerney LLP defended the fee request, noting not only that the grouped settlement is the largest ever in a "futures and options on futures only" case governed by the Commodity Exchange Act — but also that even two banks dismissed from the case, SocGen and HSBC, settled to avoid potential future exposure.  "We're proud of what we've done," Kovel said.

"I hear you but I still find the numbers high," Judge Buchwald said, indicating that the roughly 30% fee request could potentially be cut back below 20%.  Judge Buchwald noted that the two lead firms' requests encompass work done by 12 firms in total and bills for some 80,000 hours.

"That's just duplicative," the judge said.  "It's even worse but I will leave out the pejoratives.  I obviously will have to think some more about it, but I don't think the end result is going to be that you are going to get everything that you asked for."  The judge did approve $5.6 million of expenses for the plaintiffs' firms, as well as $25,000 bonus payments for named plaintiffs including Metzler and Atlantic Trading.