A recent BLT Blog post, “Washington Firm Demands Fee Cut of TV Writers’ Settlement Fund” reports that Washington-based employment law firm Kator, Parks & Weiser (KPW) is seeking more than $75,000 in legal fees for work representing a group of television writers in an age discrimination class action.  The class action, in California state court, ended in a $70 million settlement last year.  The settlement called for $23.3 million in legal fees to be split among the plaintiffs’ firms.  Kator Parks, one of several shops that represented the writers in the litigation, said in a complaint filed in Washington’s federal district trial court that it has not been paid its attorney fees.

The fee complaint (pdf), filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, names as defendants Maia Caplan Kats, a former lawyer with the firm, and trustees of the settlement fund, Paul Sprenger and Jane Lang of Washington’s Sprenger & Lang.  Kats said she believes KPW “knowingly violated confidentiality orders and agreements by filing their document without sealing as it implicates and references the multiple-party fee dispute and arbitration.”  The Kator Parks complaint said the settlement agreement included an arbitration clause “that provided any such dispute be kept confidential except to the extent necessary to resolve the dispute.”

According to the complaint, Kats was an attorney at KPW between July 2000 and May 2010, when she resigned.  A California state judge approved the $70 million settlement in June 2010.  An agreement among the firms provided a blueprint for the allocation of the attorney fee award among the firms representing the plaintiffs.  An attorney fee dispute arose among the law firms, according to Kator Parks’ complaint.