By Mike Scarcella
July 17 (Reuters) - Two prominent U.S. law firms that said they invested more than $100 million in attorney time litigating a complex antitrust case against major banks were awarded $35 million in legal fees on Thursday by a judge in Manhattan.
U.S. District Judge J. Paul Oetken’s order approved the full amount in fees that law firms Cohen Milstein and Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan sought for their work in the litigation, which netted $71 million in settlements. The judge also separately granted $23 million in expenses requested by the firms.
In their fee request in April, the firms said receiving the requested amount would still leave them with what they described as “substantial losses.”
Cohen Milstein and Quinn Emanuel represented investors who accused Credit Suisse, Bank of America BAC.N, Goldman Sachs GS.N, JPMorgan Chase JPM.N and other banks of conspiring to rig the multitrillion-dollar market for interest rate swaps.
Lead attorneys for the investors had no immediate comment.
Bank of America, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse, now part of UBS, declined to comment. The banks and other defendants denied any wrongdoing.
In 2022, Credit Suisse agreed to pay $25 million to settle investors' claims.
Oetken in December 2023 refused to certify the investors’ lawsuit as a class action, limiting the potential damages in the case.
The investors’ appeal was pending when they struck a final settlement with the remaining banks for a combined $46 million to resolve the claims against them.
The law firms told Oetken that $35 million was “a small fraction of the huge amounts that class counsel invested in this case.”
In his fee order, Oetken said that there was a significant risk the investors would have recovered less or nothing at all without the settlements.
The case is In re: Interest Rate Swaps Antitrust Litigation, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 16-md-02704.
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(Reporting by Mike Scarcella)
((Mike.Scarcella@thomsonreuters.com;))
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