The Lawyers Asked For $3.7 Million Twice. They Got Exactly $3.7 Million Both Times.

Legal Receipts

The Third Circuit’s own words do most of the damage here. These are verbatim excerpts from the June 11, 2026 opinion.

“Class action counsel serve a valuable role in our legal system and deserve to be paid. But not twice.”

• This is the opening line of the entire opinion, and the court chose it deliberately.
• It frames the whole case as a story about double payment, not about whether class counsel deserved fees at all.

“Perhaps not coincidentally, that multiplier yielded a fee award of $3.7 million—which the District Court ordered be paid to Class Counsel.”

• The appeals court is pointing out, in its own dry way, that a district judge picked a multiplier that happened to produce exactly the number the lawyers asked for.
• This sentence describes the first fee order. The same pattern repeated in the second one, with a different multiplier and a different baseline, landing on the same $3.7 million.

“A Michelangelo should not charge Sistine Chapel rates for painting a farmer’s barn.”

• The court used this line, borrowed from an earlier Third Circuit case, to explain why billing routine work at senior-partner rates is a problem.
• It directly targets the finding that more than 80% of billed hours, over 2,300 hours, came from partners.

“when a trial judge awards an enhancement on an impressionistic basis, a major purpose of the lodestar method—providing an objective and reviewable basis for fees—is undermined.”

• This is the Supreme Court’s own reasoning in Perdue, which the Third Circuit adopted to explain exactly what went wrong with the district court’s fee enhancement.
• It establishes the legal standard the district court failed twice: an enhancement has to be justified with specific evidence, not a feeling that the case was complicated.

Legal Minimalism: The Letter but Not the Spirit

The Settlement Agreement said BMW would pay “reasonable attorneys’ fees” and never defined how to calculate them. That silence is exactly what got exploited, twice.

• The Agreement set two numbers and nothing else: Class Counsel could request up to $3.7 million, and BMW agreed not to oppose anything up to $1.5 million. Everything in between was left to a judge’s discretion.
• Round one: the district court calculated a $1.9 million baseline lodestar (2,713 hours at $716/hour), then applied a 1.94 multiplier. Result: exactly $3.7 million.
• Round two, after the Third Circuit vacated that award: the baseline changed to about $2.1 million (2,877 hours at $726/hour), and the multiplier dropped to 1.75. Result: exactly $3.7 million again.
• The court found this pattern relied on factors, like “risk of nonpayment” and case complexity, that the Supreme Court’s Perdue decision says are already baked into the baseline lodestar and cannot be counted twice.
• Technically, “reasonable attorneys’ fees” was never violated on paper. In practice, the number was reverse-engineered to hit a pre-set ceiling twice, using two unrelated formulas.

Profit-Maximization at All Costs

The billing pattern behind the $3.7 million request shows senior partners doing high volumes of work that did not require senior partners.

• More than 2,300 of the 2,877 total hours billed, over 80%, came from partners billing at partner rates rather than associates at lower rates.
• 262 hours were billed to draft complaints, 222 of them by partners, even though the court found the second and third complaints were “largely identical” to the first, differing “in only minor respects.”
• 172 hours were billed for “negotiation and settlement,” including 97 hours to send three partners to a single day of mediation, with no record showing each partner did distinct, non-duplicative work.
• 279 more hours, almost all billed by partners, covered document production, meet-and-confers, and routine correspondence with the court.
• The $3.7 million ultimately awarded was roughly double the underlying baseline lodestar in both rounds, a gap created entirely by the multiplier, not by additional documented work.

This Is the System Working as Intended

It took nine years and two full appellate reversals to catch a pattern the court itself flagged as “not coincidental.” That is not a fluke. That is what happens when a contract says “reasonable fees” and leaves everything else to discretion.

• The same district judge produced the identical $3.7 million figure twice, using two different baselines and two different multipliers, a pattern the appeals court itself called out as “[p]erhaps not coincidentally.”
• The Settlement Agreement let Class Counsel set its own ceiling at $3.7 million while BMW pre-agreed not to fight anything up to $1.5 million, a 2.5x gap that got closed by judicial discretion rather than documented hours.
• The district court gave Class Counsel “some leeway” on partner-heavy staffing based on the case’s “uniquely complex nature,” even while separately admitting the hours looked “excessive” on their face.
• Before this ruling, the Ninth, Sixth, and Eleventh Circuits had already reached the same conclusion about contract-based fee awards, meaning trial courts nationwide could apply lodestar multipliers to contractual settlements without the stricter Supreme Court standard until each circuit closed the gap on its own.

What a Legitimate Fix Looks Like

This case exposes what happens when a fee-shifting contract sets a ceiling and a floor but no methodology in between: the number in the middle gets reverse-engineered instead of calculated.