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Judge Cuts Attorney Fees in Xerox Pension Case

December 14, 2016 | Posted in : Fee Reduction

A recent New York Law Journal Law story, “Judge Cuts Attorney Fees for Plaintiffs Counsel in Xerox Pension Case,” reports that a federal judge has reduced to $4.71 million from $7.6 million the amount of legal fees that lawyers who represented former Xerox Corp. workers can collect from a successful lawsuit against the company over their pension benefits.

Western District Judge David Larimer ruled from Rochester Monday in Frommert v. Conkright, 00-cv-6311L, that the legal ins-and-outs of a case that has been contested since 2000 do not obscure the fact that more than 100 plaintiffs prevailed in their basic contention in 2011 that Xerox used a "phantom" account to deprive some retirees of benefits to which they were entitled under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) (NYLJ, Dec. 24, 2013).

Larimer said that despite arguments by Xerox to the contrary, the plaintiffs prevailed in the legal action and their attorneys are entitled to fees as a result under 29 U.S.C. §1132(g)(1), the ERISA fee recovery statute.

He also said that reductions of the fees sought was appropriate both in the number of hours charged by the plaintiffs' attorneys and their hourly rates. Some of the charges sought by the attorneys seemed to be duplicative and he imposed reductions in those instances, the judge found.

"There is some fat to be cut," Larimer wrote.

The largest portion of the awarded fees went to Shaun Martin of the University of San Diego Law School ($1.75 million), Peter Stris ($737,725) and Brendan Maher ($762,307) of Stris & Maher of Los Angeles, and the late Robert Jaffe ($641,900) of Springfield, New Jersey.