Lawyers for Raytheon Retirees Get Fees Trimmed in Pension Suit

The lawyers who sued Raytheon Co. over its pension calculations in Boston federal court and obtained a class settlement of nearly $60 million will get about $5.5 million in fees and costs after the company objected to their requested fees.

The attorneys’ fee award, approved Monday by Chief Judge Patti B. Saris in an electronic docket entry, is about $3 million less than the $8.9 million in fees and costs initially requested by class counsel. Raytheon balked at this request last month, telling Saris such an award would be more than five-and-a-half times greater than the amount class counsel would receive based on their hours worked at the normal hourly rate. This would give class counsel an hourly rate of “more than $3,800 per hour—an amount that far exceeds any conceivable range of reasonableness,” Raytheon said.

Class counsel—attorneys with Izard, Kindall & Raabe LLP and Bailey & Glasser LLP—defended the fee request, saying they shouldn’t be “penalized for efficiency” with a reduction in fees. Saris then held a video conference in which she instructed class counsel to file a revised request.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, accused Raytheon of violating the Employee Retirement Income Security Act by calculating certain pensions using decades-old life expectancy tables and unreasonable interest rate assumptions. Because those tables don’t take into account recent increases in lifespan, workers who choose certain optional pension formats—such as pensions that include payments for their spouses after their deaths—have their benefits unfairly reduced compared to other workers and in violation of federal law, retirees claim.

Raytheon’s settlement—which is expected to provide average pension increases of about $4,737 for more than 10,000 retirees—is the first class settlement announced in the recent series of lawsuits raising these claims. Similar cases have moved forward against Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc., U.S. Bancorp, Rockwell Automation Inc., and Partners Healthcare System Inc., while UPS and AT&T won dismissal of the cases against them.

Raytheon is represented by Covington & Burling LLP and Goodwin Procter LLP.

The case is Cruz v. Raytheon Co., D. Mass., No. 1:19-cv-11425, electronic order 6/14/21.