A federal judge in San Francisco just handed lawyers roughly $147 million for their work suing Google over privacy violations. The payout comes from a case where a jury found Google secretly collected app activity data from about 98 million people who had explicitly told the company to stop tracking them.
US District Judge Richard Seeborg issued the ruling in Rodriguez et al v. Google LLC, awarding the fee to a legal team led by Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, Susman Godfrey LLP, and Morgan & Morgan. The amount represents approximately one-third of the total common fund, which grew to about $440.3 million after pre-judgment interest was added to the original jury verdict.
The math behind the money
The underlying jury verdict, reached in September 2025, pegged Google’s liability at $425.65 million in compensatory damages. That figure climbed to roughly $440.35 million once interest was factored in. The case centered on Google’s practice of collecting app activity data from users who had toggled off tracking features, a move that affected an estimated 98 million people.
Lead counsel David Boies billed at $2,730 per hour. Across the entire legal team, attorneys logged more than 49,670 hours of work, producing a lodestar, the baseline calculation of reasonable fees, that exceeded $56 million. The actual fee award of nearly $147 million represents a multiplier of roughly 2.6 times that lodestar figure, reflecting what Judge Seeborg described as the extraordinary circumstances of the case.
