The Contingency ‘Plan’

So, how much should the plaintiffs’ attorneys who wrangled a $12 million settlement receive for their time, effort and trouble?

 

Well, if you’ve been keeping up with such things, you’ll do some quick math and arrive at a figure of $4 million since, after all, these class action suits[1]—undertaken on a contingent fee basis—generally produce a pay day of somewhere between 25% and 30% of the settlement amount.[2]

 

In this case, that’s the settlement amount requested by the law firm of Schlichter Bogard & Denton for their work in a suit involving Oracle Corp. and its 401(k) plan (over 6,300 hours—5,631.10 hours of attorney time & 696.5 hours of non-attorney time—according to the filing (Troudt v. Oracle Corp., D. Colo., No. 1:16-cv-00175, motion for attorneys’ fees 5/8/20). That’s aside from the requested reimbursement of what those same attorneys characterize as “reasonable out-of-pocket expenses of $410,501.60,[3] and $25,000 for each of the named class representatives.”

 

The filing states that that fee “would not even provide the lodestar[4] amount that the attorneys who handled this case would have generated on an hourly rate charge, and would provide no compensation or multiplier to Class Counsel for the substantial risk of nonpayment they undertook.” Specifically, those 6,327.60 hours add up to a combined lodestar of $4,316,867.00—only 92% of the hourly rate of the Schlichter lawyers and staff in working on this case.

 

Par for the course in such motions, the plaintiffs take pains to justify settlement in lieu of a full adjudication of the issues by pointing out the uncertainty of the result. Here they not only note that “even if Plaintiffs prevailed at trial the aggressive defense presented the possibility that Class Members would have to wait over a decade to receive any compensation pending multiple appeals,” explaining that both Tussey v. ABB, Inc. and Tibble v. Edison took more than a dozen years and involved multiple appeals.

 

The filing cites the “fact-intensive nature of the remaining imprudent investment claims,” the “adverse findings” in the case of Sacerdote v. New York Univ. “…on similar imprudent investment claims, including the court’s rejection of Plaintiffs’ expert, who was the same expert here.” 

 

The petition makes two other obvious but seldom acknowledged points. First, that the named plaintiffs “…would not have been unable to pursue this litigation other than on a contingency fee basis and no competent plaintiffs’ lawyer or law firm would take on such risky representation for less than one-third of any monetary recovery.”

 

Second—and perhaps just as importantly—they acknowledge that “as a plaintiffs’ law firm that works solely on a contingency basis, the decision to pursue this class action and commit significant resources and potentially thousands of attorney hours to obtain a successful recovery impacts Class Counsel’s ability to handle other actions.”
And that, it seems fair to say, is the contingency “plan.”

 

 

[1] This settlement, as have several in this genre, notably those brought by the Schlichter law firm, are more than just monetary, of course. This one in particular imposes limitations on the recordkeeper (current and over the next three years) in terms of soliciting plan participants for non-retirement plan related services.
https://www.napa-net.org/news-info/daily-news/another-excessive-fee-suit...

 

[2] Indeed, according to the filing, when you take into account the benefit of the tax deferral on the settlement amount once its restored to the 401(k), the requested fee is 28% of the settlement’s full value.

 

[3] According to the filing, the “vast majority of these fees were incurred for necessary experts and to conduct critical depositions.”

 

[4] Basically, the lodestar method involves multiplying the number of hours reasonably devoted to the case by a reasonable hourly rate—the latter may, of course, vary based on the geographical area, the nature of the services provided, and the experience of the attorneys. And, of course, what’s deemed “reasonable.”