Raytheon Retirees’ Lawyers Want Too Much Money, Company Says

The lawyers who sued Raytheon Co. over its pension calculations and obtained a class settlement valued at nearly $60 million should receive attorneys’ fees far lower than the $8.5 million they requested, the defense contractor told a federal judge in the District of Massachusetts.

The requested fees of $8.5 million are 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, Raytheon said in a motion filed Wednesday. Were the court to grant this request in full, class counsel “would receive 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—said the fee request was justified in part because the case involved a “novel and highly technical legal theory that Class Counsel pioneered.”

Even so, such a large fee award isn’t justified, Raytheon said.

“While Defendants do not dispute that the case involves some novel (and so far, untested) legal theories, they also note that this case is one of at least nine others that Class Counsel has filed against other plan sponsors, which raise substantially the same issues,” the company said. “As a result, the work performed in this case benefits Class Counsel’s other cases—and vice versa. There is no reason why Defendants’ retirees should foot the bill in this case for work that benefits a plethora of class actions.”

The lawsuits accuse Raytheon and other employers 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, according to the lawsuits.

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 this series of lawsuits. 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, objection to fee request 5/12/21.