Opinion ID: 1349586
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Transparency of the Proceedings

Text: Riepen claims that the fee award was the product of a flawed process in which the District Court accepted summaries from the auditor and Plaintiffs' Liaison Counsel instead of requiring the public filing of actual time and expense reports from Class Counsel. According to Riepen, the procedure adopted by the District Court violates the principles of transparency espoused by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in In re High Sulfur Content Gasoline Prods. Liab. Litig., 517 F.3d 220 (5th Cir.2008). In High Sulfur, the lead plaintiffs' counsel in a class action persuaded the district court, during an ex parte hearing and without the benefit of supporting data, to divide a lump sum attorneys' fee award among more than six dozen plaintiffs' lawyers. Id. at 223. At that same hearing, the Court accepted [l]ead [c]ounsel's proposed order sealing the individual awards; preventing all counsel from communicating with anyone about the awards; requiring releases from counsel who accepted payment; and limiting its own scope of review of objections to the allocation. Id. at 223-24. Because the record [was] bereft of factual information essential to ... appellate review, and because the sealing of the record protect[ed] no legitimate privacy interest that would overcome the public's right to be informed, the Court of Appeals vacated the award. Id. at 229-30. There are two answers to Riepen's reliance on High Sulfur. First, this case is so factually distinct from that one that comparing the two is fruitless. Far from adjudicating the fee award in an ex parte hearing, the District Court solicited submissions from all interested parties concerning what steps and procedures the court should implement, as well as a suggested timetable, in determining any final or other awards of attorneys' fees, and it held three public hearings on the matter. (App. at 12624.) Moreover, during adjudication of both the interim and final fee awards, the Court permitted objections and allowed objectors to take limited discovery, though it need not have granted any discovery at all. See Prudential, 148 F.3d at 338, 342 (recognizing that discovery in connection with fee motions should rarely be permitted, and that whether to grant discovery is committed to the sound discretion of the [district] court (internal quotations and citation omitted)). Finally, the Court required the auditor and Plaintiffs' Liaison Counsel to submit volumes of data reflecting the time and money that Class Counsel spent on the diet drugs litigationdata that the Court put on the public record and used to support the fee award that it ultimately granted. [31] Second, High Sulfur aside, the fee proceedings were amply transparent under our precedent. Indeed, it is difficult to discern what the District Court reasonably could have done to increase the level of transparency associated with the fee award. Riepen suggests that the Court should have considered and made public Class Counsel's individual billing records, but we have held that courts need not always engage in that time-consuming process. See Rite Aid, 396 F.3d at 306-07 ([D]istrict courts may rely on summaries submitted by the attorneys and need not review actual billing records. (citing Prudential, 148 F.3d at 342)). In large cases, especially one of prodigious proportions like this, reliance on summaries is certainly within the discretion of the district court. Also, as the High Sulfur Court recognized, transparent fee proceedings are necessary, in part, so that we can engage in meaningful appellate review of the resulting award. The District Court's procedures in this case have been more than adequate to that end. [32]