Judge awards $147M in legal fees to Google privacy case lawyers

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.

Judge Seeborg also acknowledged a detail that privacy class actions almost always produce: the enormous gap between what the lawyers earn and what individual class members actually receive. Each of the 98 million affected users is expected to collect less than $5.

Five years in the making

The case began in July 2020 when lead plaintiff Anibal Rodriguez filed suit against Google. What followed was more than five years of litigation, including extensive discovery, pre-trial motions, and a multi-week trial that ultimately produced the nine-figure verdict.

Judge Seeborg denied Google’s motion to overturn the jury’s finding, reaffirming the verdict in its entirety. The ruling effectively endorsed the jury’s conclusion that Google’s data collection practices crossed a legal line by continuing to gather information from users who had opted out of tracking.

Some class members filed objections to the fee award, a common occurrence in large class actions where the disparity between lawyer compensation and individual recovery tends to raise eyebrows. Judge Seeborg addressed those concerns but ultimately sided with the plaintiffs’ attorneys, citing the performance of counsel and the complexity of the litigation as justifications for the award.

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