Lawyers for plaintiffs in NCAA settlement seek $525 million in legal fees

This story and headline were updated to add new information.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs in a proposed multi-billion-dollar settlement of three athlete-compensation antitrust cases against the NCAA and the Power Five conferences are asking a federal judge to award them nearly $525 million in attorneys’ fees and costs, according to filings they made Tuesday.

In addition, as permitted by the proposed agreement, the plaintiffs’ lawyers also asked for the right to apply annually to a judge or special master for additional amounts that, according to the filings, could total roughly another $250 million.

Nearly all of the money comprising both amounts would be set to be paid over a 10-year period. The plaintiffs have been led primarily by Steve Berman of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP and Jeff Kessler of Winston & Strawn LLP.

The documents come a little more than two months after U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken granted preliminary approval to the wide-ranging agreement, which would fundamentally change the structure of college sports. In addition to providing a $2.8 billion damages pool for current and former athletes over a span of 10 years, the deal would allow Division I schools to start paying athletes in any sport directly for use of their name, image and likeness, subject to a per-school cap that would increase over time.

It is expected that the initial amount of the cap would be $20 million to $23 million for the 2025-26 school year.

Also as part of the agreement, Division I athletics programs that provide these NIL payments would no longer be subject to longstanding sport-by-sport scholarship limits, but rather to sport-by-sport roster limits. In the first academic year after final approval of the settlement the roster limit in football, for example, would be 105. Many Power Five schools recently have had rosters of more than 125 players, according to data compiled by USA TODAY Sports through open-records requests.

The additional $250 million for which the plaintiffs’ attorneys are seeking to the right to apply comes from a provision in the settlement agreement that would allow them to seek 0.75% to 1.25% of the annual total amount spent by Division I schools on NIL agreements with athletes, and up to certain limits, new scholarships and academic achievement awards that were created when NCAA restrictions on education-related benefits for athletes were overturned by the Supreme Court in the Alston case in June 2021.

If all 68 Power Four conference schools were to provide $20 million in a year, that amounts to $1.36 billion — and that’s without taking into account any other Division I school providing benefits, as some outside the Power Four seem likely to do.

All of this is subject to final approval by Wilken, who has scheduled a hearing on the matter for April 7, 2025 in Oakland, California. And her ruling would be subject to appeal.

One former college football player and his attorney tied up a monetary settlement in a previous college-sports compensation case by pursuing the matter to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, with the objection based in part on the attorneys’ fees and costs award. That bid ultimately failed, but it ended up delaying final resolution by about two years.

If there are appeals in this case, the settlement agreement states that schools will be allowed to begin offering payments to their athletes and the roster limits would go into place for 2025-26, but damages money and payments for the plaintiffs’ lawyers would be held in escrow until all appeals are resolved.

While the damages pool under the proposed settlement is $2.8 billion, lawyers for the plaintiffs said in their filings Tuesday that ‘expert and lay evidence indicates (the settlement) is likely (to) increase benefits to college athletes by $20 billion or more’ over the next 10 years. The filings described this as ‘one of the largest recoveries in antitrust history.’

In furthering their case for the fees and costs award, the plaintiffs’ lawyers called this a ‘bet-the-company’ case resulting in a ‘monumental settlement’ that ‘revolutionizes college sports’ and will ‘provide college athletes with the opportunity to earn the same percentage of revenues as professional athletes in the NFL and NBA.’

On a more legalistic level, the plaintiffs’ lawyers wrote that their request constitutes 18.3% of the ‘cash common funds before any cash value is assigned to the future benefits stand to receive.’ Using $20 billion as the value of those benefits, as estimated by an economics expert for the plaintiffs, the lawyers wrote that their potential fee request would decrease to ‘3.2% of the total value of the settlement.’ They added that 25% of the settlement value has been used as the benchmark for cases in states covered by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which include California.