In the largest attorney fee award in a private antitrust case, a federal judge in Brooklyn has granted a group of plaintiffs attorneys $544.8 million for a class action filed on behalf of 12 million merchants against Visa, Mastercard and a group of banks. U.S. District Judge John Gleeson gave the firms all but $25 million of the amount they requested, noting that a similar earlier case had failed, and they weren’t piggybacking on a government action. “If not for the attorneys’ willingness to endure for many years the risk that their extraordinary efforts would go uncompensated, the settlement would not exist,” the judge wrote in his 17-page order.
The plaintiffs lawyers, who filed their litigation in 2005, were led by Robins Kaplan Miller & Ciresi, Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, and Berger & Montague. These three firms contributed about 55 percent of the hours in the fee request, which suggests they could split about $270 million.
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