”Initially, you look at it and think this is a big number,” Bartholomew said. ”When you look at how contingency litigation works generally, and then you think about how this fits into the class-action landscape, this is not a particularly unusual request.”
The original lawsuit was filed in June 2020 and it took until November 2023 for Wilken to grant class certification, meaning she thought the case had enough merit to proceed. Elon University law professor Catherine Dunham said gaining class certification is challenging in any case, but especially a complicated one like this.
”If a law firm takes on a case like this where you have thousands of plaintiffs and how many depositions and documents, what that means is the law firm can’t do other work while they’re working on the case and they are taking on the risk they won’t get paid,” Dunham said. ”If the case doesn’t certify as a class, they won’t get paid.”
In the request for fees, the firm of Hagens Berman said it had dedicated 33,952 staff hours to the case through mid-December 2024. Berman, whose rate is $1,350 per hour, tallied 1,116.5 hours. Kessler, of Winston & Strawn, said he worked 1,624 hours on the case at a rate of $1,980 per hour.
The case was exhaustive. Hundreds of thousands of documents totaling millions of pages were produced by the defendants — the NCAA, ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC — as part of the discovery process.
Berman and Kessler wrote the ”plaintiffs had to litigate against six well-resourced defendants and their high-powered law firms who fought every battle tooth and nail. To fend off these efforts, counsel conducted extensive written discovery and depositions, and submitted voluminous expert submissions and lengthy briefing. In addition, class counsel also had to bear the risk of perpetual legislative efforts to kill these cases.”
