A 58.8% FEE AWARD?: Class Counsel Awarded Well Over Half Of A TCPA Class Action Settlement Pot And What Is Going On Here?

The discrepancy between the huge sums of money awarded to Plaintiff’s lawyers in TCPA class actions  and the relative pennies handed out to class members is bad enough when those attorneys recover a mere 30-40% of the overall settlement fund.

But a new TCPA class action settlement in New York has resulted in a remarkable 58.8% fee award– and I’ve never seen anything like it.

In Watson v. Manhattan Luxury Automobiles 2026 WL 2267941 (S.D.N.Y. Aug. 8, 2026) the parties reached a class action settlement of $710.000.00 on the 418 members of the class in this certified class action. 376 of those members participated meaning each class member would recover about $270.00–that totaled only $104,500., however.

So what will happen to the rest of the money?

Well class counsel asked for over $400k in fees out of the $710k pot– which is an “extremely high” percentage in the words of the court.

But when looking at the lodestar– i.e. the reasonable fees worked on the case– the court viewed matters as follows:

The lodestar value is $598,975, calculated as the “reasonable hourly rate multiplied by the hours reasonably expended.” Fikes, 62 F.4th at 723. Two attorneys, each with more than ten years of legal experience — Daniel Zemel and Elizabeth Apostola — billed at a rate of $500 per hour for a total of 1197.95 hours

Let me just say– $500.00 an hour is low. My rack litigation rate is $3,000.00 and my associates all bill over $500.00 an hour. So any award based on a $500.00 an hour rate is, indeed, reasonable.

The number of hours seems right too. The parties litigated this case for years. So although 1200 hours on a single case may seem high, in federal court complex litigation  that’s really about right. This is especially true as the settlement came “five days before the scheduled final pretrial conference and less than three weeks before trial.”

On the other hand the Court refused to allow class counsel to recover $25k that was awarded as a sanction earlier in the case. The Court found it would be unfair to make the class pay for an error in an expert report leading to the sanction– class counsel has to bear that cost.

Make of this one what you will. It can be read as a poster child for lawsuit abuse– with plaintiff’s lawyers taking huge chunks of class settlements and class members getting very little. Or it can be read as a case highlighting the risks to plaintiff’s lawyers in pursuing years long litigation on micro-classes against underfunded companies.

This is definitely not the result either party would have hoped for here– and I have to give the defendant credit for fighting this case so hard for so long. Definitely will give other plaintiff’s lawyers pause about filing these sorts of suits– although they still got a pretty nice chunk of change here.

Have a great weekend all!

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