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Strategies & Market Trends : Anthony @ Equity Investigations, Dear Anthony, -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: StockDung who wrote (101147)	11/1/2007 1:10:18 PM
From: scion	Respond to of 122087

Law Firms to Ask For $460 Million In Tyco-Case Fees By NATHAN KOPPEL November 1, 2007; Page A15 online.wsj.com Three plaintiffs' firms are expected tomorrow to seek a court award of $460 million in legal fees that they said would be the largest fee payout in a securities class action. The suit alleges, among other claims, that Tyco International Ltd. committed securities fraud by improperly accounting for acquisitions and manipulating quarterly results. Earlier this year, Tyco agreed to pay about $3 billion to settle the case, which would be the largest payout in a securities litigation by one company. Tyco's auditor at the time -- PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, which was also a defendant -- has agreed to pay $225 million. At a hearing tomorrow in federal court in New Hampshire, Judge Paul Barbadoro will be asked to approve the $3.2 billion settlement as well as the requested fees. The lead plaintiffs' firms, Grant & Eisenhofer PA; Milberg Weiss LLP; and Schiffrin, Barroway, Topaz & Kessler LLP -- are seeking to recoup about $29 million in expenses in addition to the fees. The lead plaintiffs' counsel will share some of the fees and expenses awarded with other firms that played a supporting role in the case. But the three law firms, which last week made a fee-request filing in a federal court in Concord, N.H., face a hurdle. Their fee request equals 14.5% of the proposed settlement. In similar cases, known as mega securities settlements, fees have averaged closer to 10%. "This is something of an outlier in terms of the percentage of the fee request," says Adam Savett, a director of the Securities Class Action Services Group, a unit of RiskMetrics Group. He added, "Plus, the sheer size of the fee check that the judge will picture in his mind might pose a burden." Three state institutional investors that are plaintiffs have objected, saying the fees should be reduced. "A 14% fee is the norm for much smaller settlements," says H. Craig Slaughter, the executive director of the West Virginia Investment Management Board, one of the objectors. "I generally would expect the percentage fee award to fall as the dollar amount of a settlement increases, especially one the size of this settlement." While the institutions were members of the plaintiffs' class, they were not lead plaintiffs, which typically have a direct relationship with the firms running the litigation. In the fee application, the firms stated that the plaintiffs' attorneys in the case spent more than 488,000 hours on the litigation and reviewed 83 million pages of records -- more than the combined number of records reviewed in the 16 securities cases that have yielded the largest settlements to date, according to the filing. "In light of the amount of work that has been done in the case, and the result, we feel the fee request is justified," says Jay Eisenhofer, co-lead plaintiffs counsel and a partner in Grant & Eisenhofer. Write to Nathan Koppel at nathan.koppel@wsj.com1 URL for this article: online.wsj.com Hyperlinks in this Article: (1) mailto:nathan.koppel@wsj.com