Opinion ID: 1349586
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Value of Benefits Attributable to Others

Text: In assessing whether Class Counsel had benefitted from the efforts of other groups, such as government agencies conducting investigations, AT & T, 455 F.3d at 165 (citation omitted), the District Court noted that this case differed from the typical antitrust or securities litigation in which the Gunter/Prudential factors are often consideredwhere government prosecutions frequently lay the groundwork for private litigation, Diet Drugs, 553 F.Supp.2d at 481. The Court concluded that, while Class Counsel was in some sense beholden to the scholars who linked the diet drugs to VHD, and beholden as well to the FDA for its efforts to remove the drugs from the market, Class Counsel had not relied on the government or other public agencies to do their work for them as has occurred in some cases. Id. at 481-82. According to Riepen, the Court committed an error of law by limiting its analysis to the efforts of scholars and the FDA, and thereby ignoring the contributions of the lawyers who, while conducting contemporaneous diet drugs litigation in Texas state courts, obtained millions of pages of discovery from Wyeth and took 43 depositions before a single deposition took place in the MDL. Because the MDL trial docket lagged behind those in state court cases in Texas, Riepen believes that the Texas lawyers provided Class Counsel a litigation road map ... [:] At the end of the day, the PMC only had to take depositions for a few months ... before [Wyeth] initiated settlement discussions with them [sic]. (Appellant's Br., No. 08-2363, at 39.) Riepen is correct that the District Court did not mention the Texas lawyers' work in conjunction with this factor. That does not mean, however, that the Court ignored the contributory efforts of the Texas lawyers in determining an appropriate percentage of recovery. The issue was litigated during both the interim and final fee adjudication, and the Court determined that, whatever the Texas cases may have added, the recoveries arising from the MDL were due to the herculean efforts of the PMC [37] in developing the case against Wyeth, in negotiating an agreement that allowed Wyeth to resolve the claims against it, and in amending the Settlement Agreement when it appeared to be in jeopardy. [38] Diet Drugs, 553 F.Supp.2d at 474. But even if we agreed that the District Court undervalued the Texas lawyers' contributionsor if we agreed with any one of Appellants' discrete challengeswe would not, on that basis alone, vacate the fee award. The fee award reasonableness factors `need not be applied in a formulaic way' because each case is different, `and in certain cases, one factor may outweigh the rest.' AT & T, 455 F.3d at 166 (quoting Rite Aid, 396 F.3d at 301). Our task is to discern whether the Court's percentage-of-recovery analysis, when examined in its totality, supports the fee that it finally determined was appropriate. The Court made numerous findings pertaining to the Gunter/Prudential factors that Appellants do not dispute. For instance, it found that (1) the work of Class Counsel yielded a $6.44 billion settlement fund that benefitted more than 800,000 class members; (2) the Diet Drugs litigation was complex, [39] and it endured significantly longer than did other super-mega-fund cases; [40] (3) Class Counsel had devoted an extraordinary amount of time to the Settlement Agreement and the litigation surrounding it; (4) the requested award was, in percentage terms, slightly below the average award granted in the super-mega-fund cases; (5) the Major Filers' consent to the joint fee petition indicated that the petitioners were not seeking fees in excess of market value; and (6) many of the Settlement Agreement's featuresincluding the multiple downstream opt-out rightswere innovative and ha[d] already served as models for other cases. [41] Diet Drugs, 553 F.Supp.2d at 472-85. On the basis of those extensive and uncontestedfindings alone, we would conclude that the District Court's fee award was not an abuse of discretion. As noted above, however, the aspects of the Court's analysis that Appellants challenge also support the percentage-of-recovery award that Class Counsel received. [42]