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Why did the plaintiffs' lawyers get so much money?
The judge "saved" Tesla shareholders $50 billion so $345 million is just a small amount of that.
Presumably many lawyers could have done that. Wouldn't it make more sense to pay them for the time and effort expended?
I commented about this above, but to reiterate: The lawyers accepted the case on a contingency basis. Since the lawyers take on a considerable amount of risk by working on contingency, they're entitled to compensation beyond what they would get for time and effort expended, defined in terms of a percentage of the settlement. Delaware law provides guidelines for how attorney's fees are to be calculated in these kinds of cases, but attorney's fees are always subject to court approval for reasonableness. A strict reading of one test entitles the attorneys to get (roughly, I'm going from memory) 10% of the amount saved if the case is settled early, 20% if the case is settled after discovery, and the full third if the case goes to trial. By that test, the attorneys in this case would theoretically be entitled to something like 18 billion, but they knew there was no way in hell the judge would ever agree to that, so instead they asked for something like 6 billion, based on some byzantine calculation where they used various discount rates to claim they were entitled to 11% of the total. The judge still disagreed, saying they were nuts to assume that kind of windfall based solely on the unusually high value of the case. The judge did agree that the number was going to be high: She pointed to the fact that the litigation took 6 years and was disrupted numerous times (most notably by COVID and Musk's acquisition of Twitter), that they billed 20,000 hours, that numerous experts were required, numerous people had to be deposed, an inordinate amount of records had to be examined, and the issues involved were incredibly complicated. She then looked at the counterproposal from the defendants, which suggested that they should instead get 15% of some lower number I'm not entirely sure how they arrived that. The judge accepted that proposal.
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Lawyers (at least by their own reckoning) are difficult to bill. If they spend 2 hours writing a letter that convinces the opposition to give up a case worth $50bn, but they say they spent 200 hours researching in preparation, do you bill them for the time spent writing or the time spent researching, and how do you get proof of the latter?
In practice, corporate lawyers tend to be paid per job and per concrete action, but they charge huge amounts for those to offset the intangible/unprovable work done. The amount is basically a function of how much money is floating around the case.
Thus $50 billion turns into $300 million, of which the majority will go to the partners of the firm, and then to the taxman (at least in the UK) before it reaches the individual lawyers involved in the case. Still a very nice payout though.
I read read somewhere that it works out to about $17,000 an hour.
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Wait til you hear about real estate agents.
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Yes, of course. Welcome to the American legal system.
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