Two attorneys representing the plaintiffs have asked a federal judge in San Francisco to grant them legal fees amounting to over $181 million, as part of a $725 million data privacy settlement with Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, to resolve a case involving the sharing of user information with third parties.
The prominent attorneys from the law firms Keller Rohrback and Bleichmar Fonti & Auld stated in a request submitted late Wednesday that the fees would represent 25 percent of the settlement funds, which is a rate "within the range determined in cases of similar size."
Attorneys Derek Loeser from Keller Rohrback and Leslie Weaver from Bleichmar Fonti & Auld noted in the document that the $725 million settlement is the largest data privacy compensation in history and the biggest private settlement that Facebook has agreed to. They added that the work on the case took more than 149,000 hours over nearly five years.
In an email to Reuters on Thursday, they stated, "Our fee petition reflects the effort that this case has required from our teams and the named plaintiffs."
The lawsuit was filed after it was revealed in 2018 that Facebook allowed the British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to access the data of approximately 87 million users.
The company did not admit to any wrongdoing as part of the settlement, which the judge initially approved in March. A final approval hearing is scheduled for September 7.
