A recent Law 360 story by Jack Karp, “Quinn Emanuel’s 2nd $185M Fee Bid Blasted as ‘Indefensible’”, reports that Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP's second attempt to win $185 million in attorney fees in $3.7 billion litigation over the Affordable Care Act still fails to justify the "indefensible" amount and barely pays "lip service" to a reevaluation ordered by the Federal Circuit, health insurers told the federal claims court.
The Federal Circuit already wiped out the $185 million attorney fee that the U.S. Court of Federal Claims awarded to Quinn Emanuel and directed the claims court to reexamine objecting class members' insistence that the firm hadn't justified its fee request, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan Inc. and UnitedHealthcare Insurance Co. said.
"Despite this clear direction, class counsel's second petition again fails to justify its lodestar and again seeks to avoid a lodestar cross-check. It instead asks the court to rubberstamp the same $185 million award," the health insurers said in their opposition to the firm's latest motion for approval of its fee request.
That motion for approval fails to support the 10,000 hours Quinn Emanuel says it spent on the case, suggests that the firm double-counted hours by including time spent on a separate multibillion-dollar class, and tries to skew its rates higher by seeking 2023 rates, even though its first fee petition was filed in 2020, according to the insurers.
"Trying to reverse-engineer defenses for its indefensible fee demand, class counsel uses inflated and unproven hours, multiplies those alleged hours by unprecedented rates, and then proposes a multiplier that is miles outside accepted norms. That is akin to applying no cross-check at all," the insurers said.
Quinn Emanuel and a group of healthcare plan insurers the firm represents have insisted the firm used a novel claim and achieved a 100% recovery for the class in litigation over so-called risk corridor payments under the ACA. But objectors Kaiser Foundation, UnitedHealthcare and others have argued that class counsel was entitled to just $8.8 million after a lodestar cross-check.
A Court of Federal Claims judge granted Quinn Emanuel's request for $185 million, or 5% of the total $3.7 billion settlement, in 2021 finding that a lodestar cross-check was unnecessary. But that conclusion "was legal error," according to the Federal Circuit, which vacated the award in 2023.
That $185 million amount was inconsistent with promises made in class opt-in notices, and the "extraordinarily high award" wasn't justified, the three-judge panel ruled, ordering the fees to be recalculated. But Quinn Emanuel's renewed request for $185 million "does little more than pay lip service" to the Federal Circuit's order, according to the insurers.
While the insurers still think their original $8.8 million fee request is reasonable, they are willing to agree to a fee award between $11.77 million and $23.14 million in "the interest of finality," they told the claims court. "[T]he objectors sincerely want class counsel to be handsomely rewarded. $11.77 [million] to $23.14 million represents an incredibly large fee award that also fulfills class counsel's promise of a lodestar cross-check," the insurers said.