Register Claims Plaintiffs’ Attorneys Are Seeking About $10 Million More Than They Agreed to Claim.
In our December 1, 2008 post, we summarized a settlement reached between a plaintiff class and The Orange County Register in an Orange County Superior Court complex case pending before Superior Court Judge David C. Velasquez. The case primarily involved newspaper carrier claims that they were effectively employees who had not been granted paid certain wages and other benefits owed to them. In the settlement as reported by the press, the plaintiff class agreed that the Register would pay carriers up to $22 million and their attorneys up to $14 million (inclusive of $2 million in costs).
Now, an imbroglio is brewing over the plaintiffs’ fee request, scheduled for hearing on June 25, 2009 before Judge Velasquez.
Plaintiffs’ lead counsel Daniel Callahan has upped the fee/costs request to $23.5 million, which is 160% of the monetary settlement to the carriers. The Register was not amused, opposing the fee request as “an unabashed embrace of avarice” and a renege on the prior fee cap deal forged in the settlement. Register’s lead attorney Thomas Nolan also stated that plaintiffs’ counsel “shamelessly asks this court to sanction an award that is $7 million more than the [plaintiffs] will receive and $10 million more than plaintiffs’ counsel had assured [the paper] that they would request.”
Mr. Callahan defended his increased fee request on numerous grounds: the lawsuit protected the public from orders by the Register that carriers drive on the wrong side of the road; he won working condition improvements for current carriers; and his firm waged an “underdog” fight against a defendant that he characterized as a consummate “obdurate defendant” that “stonewalled the plaintiffs at every turn.”
Mr. Nolan argued that $3.7 million would be a reasonable fee, and that plaintiffs’ fees should be reduced to deter lawyers from making future unreasonable demands.
For more details on this brouhaha, see John Gittelsohn’s article “Attorney seeks $23.5 million for waging suit against the Register,” which was printed in the June 15, 2009 edition of The Orange County Register (and also available for reading at its website).