GM Ignition Fee Allocation Must Look Again at Some Firms’ Bills

A proposal to allocate $24.6 million in attorneys’ fees for work on consolidated economic loss litigation over allegedly defective General Motors LLC ignition switches and other vehicle problems needs more work before it can be approved, a federal court in New York said.

The proposed allocation would spread some pain stemming from a shortfall in fees from the $120 million settlement. The “lodestar” or billing amounts aggregated from the firms involved in the class litigation came to about $78 million, according to the court.

Class counsel didn’t adequately address three firms’ objections that the plan fails to credit them for many hours of work, Judge Jesse M. Furman said Wednesday for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. So class counsel must show how much time those firms submitted and explain the differences from the proposed plan, he said.

But Furman overruled objections that some firms’ fees were chopped at too great a rate and that the three objecting firms were assigned to the wrong “tier” in the three-tiered plan.

The settlement, approved in December 2020, encompasses about 100 class actions for economic loss involving millions of recalled vehicles.

The multidistrict litigation also includes individual personal injury and wrongful death suits, many of which have settled under confidential terms in recent months, according to the court’s docket.

The number of such suits is now down to six, according to a May 17 report of the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation.

The first recalls—for ignition switches that could get jostled into the “off” position, causing stalls and air-bag failures—began in February 2014. Recalls that carried over into the next year affected millions of vehicles. More than 100 crash deaths have been linked to the faulty switches.

The economic loss suits concerned seven recalls of pre-bankruptcy GM vehicles, according to an earlier ruling of the court: five over ignition switches, key rotation, or ignition-related knee bumps; one over side airbags; and one over power steering.

The case is In re Gen. Motors LLC Ignition Switch Litig., S.D.N.Y., No. 1:14-md-02543, 5/19/21.