And did those lawyers get paid! In what is being called the largest legal payday in American history, Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins just got the court to approve their enormous fee request. So what was that record-setting amount? A cool $688 million dollars. Look for the firm to shoot up the profits-per-partner rankings next year.
Coughlin recovered $7.2 billion dollars for investors in Enron, and their fee request ended up being a little less than 10% of the total award. The court said that the amount was ''a reasonable fee earned by an extraordinary group of attorneys.'' Nice praise, indeed, especially compared to other fee requests making the news lately.
Around one and a half million people and institutions will split what's left of the $7.2 billion after Coughlin gets its cut.
But Coughlin did put in some serious time. The judge in the case, Judge Melinda Harmon, said that Coughlin had put in 289,593.35 hours on the case. That comes out to about 33 years of work at 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. The billing rate, then, was $456 an hour for all of those hours.
The firm says that it kept a minimum of twelve attorneys on the case at all times.
The firm had the following deal with the lead plaintiff, the University of California: 8% for the first $1 billion in recovery, 9% for the second billion, and 10% for anything above $2 billion. The result was a blended rate of 9.52%.
And since the case also involved lawsuits against Enron's former bankers, Coughlin defeated pretty much the who's who of the legal world. Here's a list of those defendants, what they settled for, and who their counsel was:
- Andersen Worldwide; $33.3m (£18.9m); Sidley Austin
- Bank of America; $69m (£39.2m); Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft
- Lehman Brothers; $222.5m (£126.4m); Jones Day
- Outside directors/Ken Harrison; $168m (£95.4m); Gibbs & Bruns/Tonkon Torp
- LJM2; $51.9m (£29.5m); Baker Botts
- Arthur Andersen; $72.5m (£41.2m); Latham & Watkins
- Kirkland & Ellis; $10.2m (£5.8m); Munger Tolles & Olson
- Citi; $2bn (£1.14bn); Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison
- JPMorgan Chase; $2.2bn (£1.25bn); Simpson Thacher & Bartlett
- CIBC; $2.4bn (£1.36bn); Mayer Brown
It's certainly good news in a time of legal industry trouble.
