According to Reuters, in a landmark $1.5 billion copyright settlement with artificial intelligence company Anthropic, the legal team representing the author and publisher has reduced the requested legal fees by several hundred million dollars.
On Thursday, local time, the law firm Susman Godfrey and Lieff Cabraser filed a petition in the San Francisco federal court seeking 12.5% of the settlement fund, or $187.5 million, as legal fees. Previously, Anthropic and the two judges presiding over the case objected, arguing that the fees demanded were excessive and planning to share the costs with three other law firms not designated to represent the entire class action lawsuit.
Susman and Lieff Cabraser initially requested $300 million in legal fees, of which $75 million would be allocated to three other law firms: Cowan DeBaets Abrahams & Sheppard, Edelson, and Oppenheim + Zebrak.
In a new filing submitted as part of their final approval request for the settlement, the two law firms stated that their $187.5 million request was “based solely on the workload of the class-action lawyers.” They said they would not object to the court’s decision to deny payments to lawyers who did not formally represent the class-action plaintiffs.
Anthropic agreed to the settlement last August to resolve allegations that it used hundreds of thousands of pirated books to train its AI models. The company also agreed to destroy the pirated datasets and guarantee that these works were not used in commercial AI models such as Claude.
The lawyers leading the case said the agreement requires Anthropic to pay more than $3,000 to class members for each copyrighted work, making it the largest copyright class action settlement on record.
San Francisco District Judge Alaseli Martinez-Holkin is scheduled to hold a hearing on April 23 to consider whether to ultimately approve the settlement agreement.
The case was previously heard by U.S. District Judge William Alsup, who had given preliminary approval to the settlement agreement before becoming inactive at the end of December. Judge Alsup had opposed the proposal by Susman and Lieff Cabraser to share legal fees with three other law firms, writing in a memo dated December 23 that they could not “designate others” to share the responsibility of representing the class action.
In a filing on Thursday, Susman and Lieff Cabraser stated that the three law firms, Cowan, Edelson, and Oppenheim, “made significant and substantial contributions to the class-action lawsuit.” Jay Edelson of Edelson told Reuters in an email that he was “incredibly proud of leading the negotiations and of the work his firm and Oppenheim + Zebrak did in preparing for the trial.”
