David Boies-led legal team seeks $147 million in fees from Google verdict

By Mike Scarcella

WASHINGTON, March 31 (Reuters) - David Boies and other lawyers who won a $425 million jury verdict against Alphabet's Google in a data privacy trial last year have asked a judge to award them $147 million in legal fees, according to new court filings that describe some of the highest hourly attorney rates in the U.S.

In their request on Monday in federal court in San Francisco, law firms Boies Schiller Flexner, Susman Godfrey and Morgan & Morgan said awarding the full amount would encourage plaintiffs’ lawyers to take difficult cases to trial rather than accept settlements that could shortchange class members.

A jury in September found Google liable for secretly collecting app activity data from millions of users who had disabled a tracking feature. The law firms had sought billions of dollars in damages and said they devoted 49,670 hours so far to the litigation.

The firms asked U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg in San Francisco to award them one‑third of the judgment, which has grown to more than $440 million with interest. They called the verdict “historic” and said it was likely the largest ever in a data privacy class action tried to verdict in federal court.

Google and the lead attorneys for the consumers did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Google has denied any wrongdoing and said it will appeal the jury verdict.

The lawyers as part of their fee request submitted details about their standard billing rates, which would exceed $56 million if based solely on the time they spent on the case, Boies, the lead trial lawyer for the consumers, said he has a standard billing rate of $2,730 an hour this year. Boies logged more than 1,425 hours in the case, the filings show.

The attorneys asked for a multiplier to their usual rates to account for the importance and difficulty of the lawsuit and other factors.

Boies rose to prominence as a lawyer for the U.S. government in its landmark antitrust case against Microsoft in the 1990s and for representing Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore in his unsuccessful 2000 U.S. Supreme Court battle with George W. Bush.

Another top biller, William Carmody of Susman Godfrey, charges $4,000 an hour, the records show. The firm said Carmody’s rate “is reasonable given his stature as one of the nation’s leading trial lawyers and the exceedingly complex nature of this litigation.”

Susman’s Shawn Rabin is billing in other cases at $2,500 an hour, and Morgan & Morgan’s John Yanchunis, who leads the firm’s class action group, charges $2,400 an hour.

The plaintiffs’ lawyers told Seeborg that “the substantial risk undertaken by Class Counsel in this complex case further supports the fee request.”

A hearing on the fee request is scheduled for Aug. 13.

The case is Rodriguez v. Google LLC, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, No. 3:20-cv-04688.

For plaintiffs: David Boies and Mark Mao of Boies Schiller Flexner; Bill Carmody and Shawn Rabin of Susman Godfrey; and John Yanchunis and Ryan McGee of Morgan & Morgan

For Google: Michael Attanasio, Benedict Hur and Simona Agnolucci of Cooley

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