Reason: Proposed U.S. Legislation to Cap Fee Recovery to Class Counsel.
Many of you readers may have seen the very colorful, serene television advertisements urging potentially qualified class members to phone or email in about specifics on the Cobell Indian Land Trust Settlement. Well, everything may not be serene about this settlement given recent legislation introduced by Representatives Doc Hastings of Washington state and Don Young of Alaska in the U.S. House of Representatives on March 2, 2011.
As reported by Lorna Thackeray of The Billings Gazette in a March 4, 2011 post, Representatives Hastings and Young co-proposed a bill that would cap lawyers’ fees in the $3.4 million Cobell Indian Trust Settlement at $50 million.
We earlier reported (see our “In the News” post of February 3, 2011) that the class action attorneys behind the settlement had filed a petition before Senior U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan of Washington, D.C. seeking $223 million, although the actual settlement agreement set the fees at between $50 million and $99.9 million according to the federal legislators.
According to the post, some have characterized the $223 million request as being an undisclosed contingency fee agreement never made known to class members before. On the other hands, one of the class attorneys, Dennis M. Gingold of Washington, D.C., has called the bill “unprecedented intervention in a case before a U.S. district judge [that was] spun for political theater.” Mr. Gingold apparently conceded that attorneys did ask for $99.9 million in fees, but also presented the district judge with arguments that could support an award of up to $223 million–with the judge being the one who ultimately decides what an appropriate fee is.
A settlement fairness hearing has been scheduled for June 20, 2011 before Senior District Judge Hogan. Mr. Gingold is quoted as saying that the bill would kill the settlement after 14 years of costly and acrimonious litigation. He finds it ironic that there would be opposition to the fee request given that $285 million is being charged by the government in fees and costs to buy fractionated lands for the Indian tribes involved in the case. The $223 million in fees represents just 14.75% of the common fund, which is lower than the 25% presumptive standard applied by many district judges and has been defended based on the nearly 15 years during which class action attorneys carried the case before settlement. Mr. Gingold also found it ironic that Representative Young co-sponsored the bill, because he was one of the biggest advocates of the $223 million federal appropriation of the infamous Alaskan “bridge to nowhere.”