Judge Cuts Plaintiffs’ Attorney Fee

Citing “waste and inefficiency,” a U.S. District judge has slashed a $100 million fee request from a plaintiffs firm in a $590 million settlement, reports the Wall Street Journal Law Blog.  The objection to the proposed fee was spearheaded by Ted Frank and the Center for Class Action Fairness, who called it a potential “windfall” for the lawyers:

“One hopes that this encourages district courts to engage in more scrutiny of the all-too-common practice of using make-work document review at inflated billing rates… to extract tens of millions from their clients,” Mr. Frank said in an email to Law Blog. “Pension funds and other shareholding class members with fiduciary duties should do more to police fee requests when they get settlement notices, because what class counsel here did is not an outlier.”