A U.S. appeals court did not “rubberstamp” a $667 million fee award for the attorneys behind a $2.7 billion antitrust class action settlement with Blue Cross Blue Shield, the class lawyers told the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday.
Attorneys for a class of 100 million Blue Cross subscribers urged the justices to turn down a challenge to the legal fees and a broader attack on the merits of the 2020 settlement. An appeals court last year upheld the settlement and fees.
Health insurance subscribers in the decade-long case accused Blue Cross Blue Shield Association and others of unlawfully agreeing not to compete with one another. Class members alleged they paid higher insurance costs as part of the conspiracy.
Blue Cross denied the claims in agreeing to settle the Alabama federal court class action. Its lawyers on Wednesday also asked the justices to affirm the settlement. Blue Cross did not take a position on the legal fees, which would be deducted from the $2.7 billion settlement amount.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs, including Charles Cooper of Cooper & Kirk, had no immediate comment.
The settlement objector who filed the Supreme Court petition claimed the fee should be no more than $194 million, which was the “lodestar” amount, or the number of hours the lawyers said they worked multiplied by a prevailing hourly rate.
Cooper told the Supreme Court that a trial judge’s use of a different method, called “percentage of the fund,” was not improper. The fee was 23.47% of the settlement, within a “range of reasonableness” of 20% to 25%, an appeals court found.
“If the district court had been inclined to reflexively approve the petition simply because it fell under a 25% benchmark, it could have cited that undisputed fact and called it a day,” the class attorneys said.
They said the trial judge conducted a “searching analysis” before issuing its fee award. The class attorneys also said their “colossal litigation effort” justified the amount.
The cases are Home Depot v. Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 23-1063, and David G. Behenna v. Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, same court, No. 23-1163.
Read more:
US Supreme Court urged to strike lawyers' $667 mln fee in Blue Cross case
Blue Cross loses bid to block damages in long-running antitrust case
$2.7 bln Blue Cross antitrust settlement upheld by US appeals court
