Lessons From These Decisions—Substantiate Fees In Detailed Fashion In California Federal Cases And Do Not Request Excessive Hourly Rates.
Two Google cases in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, offer some guidance for class action/common fund practitioners on what to do and not do when requesting a substantial fee recovery in either a class action or common fund case.
The first case is Kumandan v. Google LLC, Case No. 19-cv-04286-BLF (N.D. Cal. Oct. 13, 2026 settlement approval/fee and costs order). This involved an assistant AI privacy lawsuit against Google, with the parties negotiating a $68 million class action settlement, with no settlement funds reverting to Google. In approving the settlement and granting substantial fees/costs to the class and its counsel, District Judge Beth Labson Freeman observed that the class settlement was exceptional, 15.15-56.7% of the maximum recovery, with Class Counsel having to contend with lots of pleading/discovery challenges and obtaining class certification in a data privacy case (no small feat). Based on these facts, she found that Class Counsel was entitled to a one-third percentage of settlement recovery as cross-checked by over 20,000 hours of work—resulting in a $22.67 million fee recovery. Class Counsel, to their credit, did provide detailed substantiation of the district judge. However, Judge Labson Freeman did not accept one counsel’s request for a $3,000 hourly rate, finding it was patently unreasonable and awarding instead $1,600 per hour.
The second case is In re Google Play Store Antitrust Litig., Case No. 3:21-cv-05227-JD (N.D. Cal. Oct. 15, 2026 order), which involved an individual action producing a common fund of $700 million, consisting of $630 million from a consumer compensation fund and $70 million from a state administered separate fund (because various state and other civil attorneys were involved). Non-state, consumer counsel sought 13.5% as attorney’s fees from the $630 million fund ($85 million fee request), alleging that counsel spent close to 100,000 hours on the case. District Judge James Donato was not impressed, denying the fee request without prejudice. He observed that requesting counsel failed to submit any detailed billing records which showed what work was done and for what purpose. The district judge observed that most of the fee substantiation had mysterious numerical billing codes, such as “pleading/briefs/pretrial motions” and “investigation/factual or legal research”—not worthy substantiation. He closed with indicating that state and other attorneys may have contributed more to the final settlement, urging the consumer attorneys to rethink the lodestar in future motion work.