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Robbins Geller Gets $19.5M in Fees in MetLife Investor Action

June 16, 2021 | Posted in : Practice Area: Class Action / Mass Tort / MDL

A recent Bloomberg Law story by Jennifer Bennett, “Robbins Geller Gets $19.5 Million Fees for MetLife Investor Suit,” reports that Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP will get about $19.5 million in fees for representing investors in a class suit against MetLife Inc. and securing an $84 million settlement, a federal judge in New York said.

Investors accused the life insurance company of overstating net income, understating liabilities, and misrepresenting the adequacy of reserves. Robbins Geller sought $21 million in attorneys’ fees, but its calculations included some hours that should have been left out, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York said.

The firm didn’t show that it was “appropriate” to include hourly rates for 35 nonlegal support staff in its lodestar calculation, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan’s opinion said. That group “billed approximately 3,098.6 hours at blended historic hourly rates ranging sharply from $60 to $518 per hour, which, at the higher end, is more than many of the firm’s associates were billed out at.”

Kaplan won’t “include the total amount billed for these personnel in the lodestar calculation,” but the judge said he would “take their contribution into account when determining the multiplier that is applied to the fees.”

There were also problems with the hourly rates for Robbins Geller’s “paralegals, litigation support personnel, law clerk, and project attorneys.” An appropriate cap for the hourly rate of the first three groups is $200, Kaplan said. And the hourly amounts for project attorneys “were neither reasonable nor efficient,” so their total charge requires a 50% reduction.

The firm said it spent almost 2,200 hours on discovery and more than 3,700 hours on document review, but that’s “excessive and redundant,” the opinion said.

Robbins Geller also included nearly 2,300 hours for litigation strategy and analysis, with nearly 80% of those hours “recorded by just one associate.” The attorneys “provide no explanation for this, leaving the Court to guess regarding what ‘strategy & analysis’ an associate attorney engaged in for many hundreds of hours,” Kaplan said.

After applying the necessary reductions, the appropriate fee amount is more than $19.5 million, the opinion said. Kaplan also approved the firm’s request for reimbursement of more than $1.8 million in litigation expenses.

The lead plaintiff asked for nearly $11,000 as recognition of the time and resources it committed to the suit. But that’s “unnecessary,” the Tuesday opinion said.