Lawyers Want $217 Million for Settling Google ‘Incognito’ Case

Lawyers are seeking $217 million in fees for their work crafting a settlement this month in a class action lawsuit alleging Alphabet Inc.'s Google improperly retained users’ web data while they used a private browsing setting.

The litigation filed in 2020 over Google Chrome’s “incognito” browser was led by lawyers at Boies Schiller Flexner, Susman Godfrey and Morgan & Morgan, who asked a federal judge on Tuesday to award the nine-figure fee. Class members in the litigation received no damages, though they can file individual claims in state court.

The lawyers say they worked 78,880 hours on the case, accruing more than $62 million in fees at their standard billing rates. They are seeking for that amount to be multiplied by 3.5 times in what is known as a “lodestar multiplier” that federal judges have discretion to apply in successful class actions.

The lawyers anticipated Google will dispute the requested fee, and argued their lodestar multiplier should not be denied even though the court declined to award damages.

Class counsel argued it was an appropriate number. The filing cited other cases with no damages award that led to multipliers between one-and-a-half and three. The lawyers cited one case that said “the range of acceptability” can be between two and four.

The lawyers are also seeking to be paid about $7.6 million for costs they incurred during the case.

Under the settlement, Google agreed to delete data records it previously obtained and extend protections under the private browsing setting for the next five years. Those protections included disabling third-party trackers. The company also changed disclosures detailing what it tracks.

The plaintiffs had asked for $5 billion in damages, but the settlement provided no monetary relief. Individuals will be allowed to file claims in state courts, and Boies Schiller lawyers have said they already filed more than 1,000 such cases in California state court, with plans to file many more.

The plaintiffs’ lawyers said Google will pay the fees. They also said both sides had agreed to waive the right to appeal Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’ fee award, scheduled to be determined in August.

The litigation was hard fought between the class-action counsel and Google’s lawyers at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan. A judge in the case in 2022 ordered Google to pay nearly $1 million for discovery misconduct after the company concealed employees’ and other relevant data.

The case is Brown v. Google, N.D. Cal., 4:20-cv-03664, 4/23/24.