U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg
SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge will allow lawyers who led a privacy class action lawsuit against Google to claim nearly $147 million in legal fees, nearly a third of the $425 million a jury had ordered the tech giant to pay for allegedly tracking more than 100 million people's data after the Google users thought they had disabled tracking.
At the same time, those same users will receive less than $5 each under the judgment as compensation for the alleged violation of their rights.
The lawyers' fees were approved in an order issued Aug. 28 by U.S. District Richard Seeborg.
In the ruling, Seeborg agreed the lawyers' fee request was "without question, extraordinary,"
particularly when compared to the very small payments the people who were allegedly actually harmed by Google's alleged misconduct would actually receive.
But the judge said the fee request was still justified because the lawyers' "exemplary performance" in bringing the case and obtaining the verdict means they should be amply rewarded for the work, regardless of how their work would financially benefit the people on whose behalf the lawyers claimed to have filed the lawsuit.
The judge said, essentially, it is enough that the lawyers made Google pay a large sum of money.
"To be sure, there is some intuitive discomfort with a fee award this large," Seeborg wrote. "The lawyers are being handsomely rewarded for their success, even as each of the 98 million class members will walk away with less than $5.
"That is, however, a consequence of the policy choice to use the class action device to remedy widespread torts. No individual class member had an incentive to bring a claim, and counsel was only incentivized to pursue the case through the prospect of a large fee award.
"In our system, there is simply no other way to ensure that a defendant that commits a small tort against a large number of people is held accountable."
The order comes nearly a year after a jury in San Francisco federal court had rendered its verdict against Google in the case.
The lawsuit had proceeded to trial nearly five years after attorneys from the firm of Boies Schiller Flexner, of San Francisco, Miami and Washington, D.C., had lodged their lawsuit.
In the action, the plaintiffs had asserted Google should be made to pay for allegedly violating at least tens of millions of Google users' privacy rights afforded under federal and California law.
Specifically, the lawsuit accused Google of allegedly misleading users into believing they could prevent Google from collecting and tracking their data by toggling off a "switch" in their account settings. However, the lawsuit asserted Google still would collect certain "anonymized data when Plaintiffs accessed third-party apps "and used that information to support its commercial activities.
Google failed to dismiss the lawsuit in its entirety, and the case ultimately went to trial concerning the plaintiffs' claims that Google's alleged conduct violated privacy rights set by California law and under the California state constitution.
At trial, the plaintiffs' lawyers told jurors the company should be made to pay $31 billion, which is the sum the attorneys estimated the company had earned in profits from its use of the information.
Jurors, however, placed the harm significantly lower, ordering the company to pay more than $425 million for allegedly violating the California state constitution's privacy rights guarantees.
Following the trial, the plaintiffs' lawyers tried and failed to persuade Seeborg to override the jury and order Google to boost its payout by more than 5 times, to $2.36 billion.
At that time, Seeborg said the case wasn't really about the data collection, but rather about Google's alleged deception. The judge noted that Google had updated its notice to users to indicate the company still may track and use certain user data. And the judge said he believed the notice was sufficient.
The judge said he didn't believe the plaintiffs had presented enough evidence to back their contention the verdict should be worth the $2 billion more they sought.
However, in his new ruling, Seeborg said the plaintiffs' lawyers had done enough to secure the $425 million verdict. So, he said, they should also be entitled to their request for $146.7 million in fees, too, regardless of who else got paid any amount of substance.
According to the online court docket, the attorney fee request drew dozens of objections from would-be class members who generally believed that paying the lawyers $146.7 million in this case was not justified, given the results the lawsuit actually generated for those allegedly actually harmed by Google's alleged conduct.
The judge did not address those objections directly in his ruling.
In the order, the judge also agreed the lead plaintiffs in the case should receive "service awards" of $50,000 to the two named plaintiffs who testified at trial, identified as Anibal Rodriguez and Julian Santiago, and $35,000 for Susan Harvey, who did not testify.
The judge said the testimony of Rodriguez and Santiago at trial were particularly "instrumental in securing a favorable verdict."
The plaintiffs were represented in the case by attorneys from the firms of Boies Schiller Flexner, of New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Miami; Susman Godfrey, of New York and Los Angeles; and Morgan & Morgan, of Tampa, Florida.
The court docket does not yet indicate if anyone intends to seek to appeal Seeborg's fee award in the case.
