Attorneys in Class Action Lawsuits: Fees, Duties, and How to Choose

Class action attorneys are the lawyers who investigate, file, and litigate a lawsuit on behalf of an entire group of people who share the same legal claim, and in most cases they are paid a court-approved percentage of whatever the case recovers rather than by the hour. Because the vast majority of class members never speak to the lawyers or appear in court, the attorneys effectively steer the case from investigation through settlement, which is why their experience, ethical obligations, and fee arrangements deserve close attention before you sign on or evaluate a firm.

What Class Action Attorneys Actually Do

A class action lets one or a few named plaintiffs sue on behalf of a much larger group, avoiding hundreds or thousands of separate cases over the same dispute.¹ The lawyers are the ones running that group case. On the plaintiff side, they investigate the claim before filing, draft the complaint, define the proposed class, handle discovery, argue for class certification, and negotiate any settlement. On the defense side, they typically work to defeat certification, file motions to dismiss, and, where possible, enforce arbitration clauses that would force disputes into individual proceedings.²

A judge does not simply accept whoever files first. When a federal court certifies a class, it must also formally appoint class counsel. Rule 23(g) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure requires the judge to weigh the attorney’s investigative work on the case, experience handling class actions and complex litigation, knowledge of the applicable law, and the resources the firm will commit to the litigation. If more than one qualified firm wants the job, the court must choose the one “best able to represent the interests of the class.”³

In practice, plaintiff-side class action work is dominated by a small group of specialized firms. Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, for example, reports settlements and verdicts totaling more than $345 billion across cases involving Big Tobacco, Volkswagen emissions, NCAA antitrust claims, and real estate commissions.⁴ Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann, Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, and Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd appear regularly in Law360’s annual rankings of top class action groups.⁵ In complex matters, a steering committee of lawyers shares responsibilities, with lead counsel setting overall strategy and liaison counsel handling communication between the court and the various legal teams.

The Arbitration Boundary

Before you even reach the question of hiring class counsel, check whether your contract with the other side blocks class treatment. In AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion (2011), the Supreme Court held that the Federal Arbitration Act preempts state laws that would treat class action waivers in consumer contracts as unconscionable, allowing companies to require customers to resolve disputes through individual arbitration.⁶ In Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis (2018), the Court extended that principle to employment contracts, holding that employers can require workers to waive the right to collective or class proceedings. At the time Epic Systems was decided, counsel estimated roughly 25 million employees were already subject to such mandatory arbitration contracts.⁷ A good plaintiff-side attorney will screen for these clauses at intake, because they can end the class case before it starts.

How Class Action Attorneys Get Paid

Plaintiff-side class action attorneys almost always work on contingency. They advance the costs of litigation and receive nothing unless the case settles or produces a verdict. When they do get paid, the fee comes out of the common fund recovered for the class, which creates an unavoidable tension: every dollar to counsel is a dollar not going to class members.⁸ The judge, not the lawyers, sets the final fee.

The Three Calculation Methods

Courts use three main approaches. The percentage method multiplies the total class recovery by a fixed percentage. The lodestar method multiplies reasonable hours worked by a reasonable hourly rate. A hybrid approach uses the percentage as the primary figure and then cross-checks it against the lodestar to guard against a windfall. During the 2009–2013 period studied, the percentage method was used in roughly 54% of cases, the mixed method in about 38%, and pure lodestar in about 6%.⁸

What Percentages Look Like in Practice

Fees have historically averaged around 23–27% of the gross recovery, depending on the study period and mix of cases.⁹ Smaller cases tend to generate higher percentages, running 28–31% for recoveries under about $4 million, while very large recoveries see the ratio drop to roughly 22% for recoveries above $67.5 million.⁸ Courts granted the full requested fee in over 70% of cases studied; when judges cut the fee, the average award was 68% of what counsel asked for.

The size of the recovery is the single most important driver. It overwhelms other factors like hours worked, case age, or how risky the litigation was.⁹ One of the largest fee awards in recent memory came in the PFAS water contamination litigation, where a federal judge awarded more than $956 million in attorney fees following settlements worth over $11 billion with manufacturers including 3M and DuPont.¹⁰

Courts Pushing Back

Appellate courts have grown more willing to strike down fee awards that outpace what class members actually receive. The Eighth Circuit in 2024 rejected a 22.5% fee award of $78.75 million in the T-Mobile data breach case after a lodestar cross-check revealed a 9.6 multiplier the court considered unreasonable. The Ninth Circuit in Lowery v. Rhapsody International (2023) vacated a $1.7 million award that was more than 30 times the $53,000 actually paid to class members. The Third Circuit vacated a $3.2 million award in the Wawa data breach case, instructing judges to use “actual distribution to class members” as the starting point. And the Second Circuit in Moses v. New York Times Co. (2023) rejected the practice of calculating fees against a settlement’s “face value,” ruling that courts must account for low redemption rates.¹¹

Low claims rates are what put those decisions on the map. An FTC study found a median claims rate of just 9% across the settlements it examined, with email-based notice campaigns averaging only 3%.¹² Large consumer actions frequently see rates of 1–2%.¹³ In Drazen v. Pinto, a 2024 Eleventh Circuit case, only 1.9% of class members filed claims, meaning a $35 million potential settlement translated to roughly $2.3 million in actual payouts while the district court had initially approved $7 million in attorney fees.¹⁴

Contingency Costs and Written Agreements

For a named plaintiff, the practical point is this: you should not be paying by the hour, and you should not be paying upfront. But the exact percentage, how litigation costs are handled, and what happens if the case is unsuccessful should all be spelled out in a written retainer agreement before representation begins.¹⁵ Ask specifically whether costs will be deducted from your share before the fee is calculated or after, because the order matters.

What Class Action Attorneys Owe You

Class counsel occupy an unusual position. They represent a named plaintiff who sits across the table from them, but they also owe duties to thousands or millions of absent class members who may never communicate with them. The New York City Bar Association’s Formal Opinion 2004-01 describes those duties as including competence, diligence, and confidentiality toward all class members, not just the named plaintiff.¹⁶

Because getting individual consent from every absent class member is impractical, the court itself functions as a check on whether counsel is acting in the group’s best interest. Attorneys may not trade the class’s interests for a better fee provision for themselves, and all fee arrangements must be disclosed so the judge can evaluate whether the settlement was compromised for counsel’s financial benefit.¹⁶ Under amendments to Rule 23 that took effect in December 2018, courts evaluating a proposed settlement must consider whether the class representatives and their attorneys adequately represented the class, whether the settlement was negotiated at arm’s length, whether the relief is adequate given the costs and risks of continued litigation, and whether class members are treated equitably relative to one another.¹⁷

Defense counsel have their own boundaries. Once a class is certified, defense lawyers generally may not communicate directly with class members about the case without the consent of class counsel or the court.¹⁶ Before certification the restriction typically does not apply, though communications must not be deceptive or coercive.

How to Choose a Class Action Attorney

If you have been contacted as a potential lead plaintiff, are trying to decide among firms soliciting your case, or are simply evaluating counsel already appointed in a case that concerns you, the same handful of criteria apply. Rule 23(g) itself lists experience as a factor courts weigh, and there is no reason a prospective client should not use the same lens.³

Track Record in Class and Complex Litigation

Look for firms that have actually litigated class actions to certification and through settlement or trial, not just individual plaintiff cases. Ask about outcomes in cases similar to yours, whether in the same subject matter (antitrust, consumer, employment, securities, data breach) or of comparable scale. A firm that has served as lead or co-lead counsel, rather than only on a steering committee, has been through the parts of the process that matter most.

Resources to See the Case Through

Class actions are expensive and slow. Discovery alone can last years and require depositions, document review, and expert witnesses on liability and damages. A firm you hire should have the financial capacity to cover those costs across a multi-year timeline and the staffing to manage them. Defense firms have increasingly taken a trial-oriented posture, investing early in aggressive depositions of named plaintiffs and retaining damages experts up front, on the theory that this drives down settlement amounts and discourages copycat filings.¹⁸ Your side needs the resources to match that.

Fee Transparency

Get the fee structure in writing before you agree to anything. Confirm the contingency percentage, whether it changes if the case settles versus goes to trial, how expenses are handled, whether you personally owe anything if the case loses, and how any court-ordered reduction in the fee will affect the arrangement.¹⁵ Given that judges now scrutinize whether fee awards are proportionate to actual class recoveries, a firm that talks in vague percentages is a warning sign.

Communication and Day-to-Day Handling

The attorney you meet in an initial consultation is often not the one handling your case day to day. Ask who will actually manage the file, how often you should expect updates, and how questions from you as a named plaintiff or class representative will be answered. A lawyer who cannot explain the case to you without falling back on jargon will not be able to explain it to class members through the notice process either, and notice comprehension is already a documented problem: the FTC found that fewer than half of recipients correctly understood what a class action notice was, and only about 41% understood the steps needed to collect a refund.¹²

Conflicts of Interest

The attorney should have no prior or current relationships with the defendants or other parties that could compromise advocacy for the class. Ask directly. A firm that has represented the defendant in unrelated matters, or that has co-counsel arrangements with firms doing so, needs to be able to walk you through why that is not a problem here.

What This Looks Like in Today’s Market

The scale of class action work has grown, which affects how quickly firms are willing to pick up new matters and how much attention any given case gets. According to the Duane Morris Class Action Review, the ten largest class action settlements in 2025 exceeded $70 billion, and total settlements across all litigation areas were approximately $80 billion, the fourth consecutive year that annual totals surpassed $40 billion. More than 13,000 class action lawsuits were filed in federal courts in 2025, averaging over 36 new filings per day, and courts granted class certification in 68% of motions brought that year.¹⁹

Some subject areas are moving faster than others. Privacy-related class actions have surged, totaling over 1,800 federal cases in 2025 alone, a 200% increase since 2022, as plaintiffs target technologies like session replay tools, website chatbots, and tracking pixels.¹⁹ Recent high-profile settlements illustrate the range of substantive areas class attorneys work in: a 2025 poultry industry wage-fixing settlement reached $398 million, UFC fighters secured $375 million in an antitrust case, and Disneyland workers received $233 million over living-wage claims.²⁰ Firms that specialize in one of these lanes will usually serve you better than a general litigation shop.

Weighing the Tradeoffs Before You Sign On

For individuals, class actions offer access to the legal system for harms that would be too small or too expensive to pursue alone. Pooling claims creates financial leverage against well-resourced defendants, and contingency fee arrangements mean there are no upfront costs. Successful cases can also force broader changes, like pulling defective products off the market or altering business practices.²¹

The tradeoffs are real. Individual payouts can be small when settlements are divided among thousands of claimants, and non-representative class members have no say in litigation decisions, including whether to settle. If the case fails, class members generally lose the right to bring their own lawsuits over the same claims.²¹ The scale and complexity of these cases can mean years of waiting before any resolution.²² The attorney you pick is the person who will manage all of that for you, so the front-end evaluation is worth taking seriously.

1
United States Courts. Class Action – Glossary of Legal Terms
2
Jones Day. Defending Class Actions
3
Cornell Law Institute. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 23
4
Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP. Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP
5
Law360. Class Action Groups of the Year
6
Supreme Court of the United States. AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion, 563 U.S. 333
7
Congressional Research Service. The Federal Arbitration Act and Class Action Waivers
8
NYU Law Review. Attorneys’ Fees in Class Actions
9
United States Courts. Attorneys’ Fees and Expenses in Class Actions
10
Environmental Health News. Significant Fees Awarded to Lawyers in PFAS Contamination Settlements
11
Class Actions Brief. Courts Scrutinize High Attorneys’ Fees Awards in Class Action Settlements
12
Federal Trade Commission. Consumers and Class Actions: A Retrospective and Analysis of Settlement Campaigns
13
Talli. Class Action Settlement Statistics
14
Class Actions Insider. Eleventh Circuit Provides New Guidance on Class Action Settlements
15
FindLaw. How to Choose a Class Action Lawyer
16
New York City Bar Association. Formal Opinion 2004-01: Lawyers in Class Actions
17
American Bar Association. Five Changes to Rule 23 Every Class Action Attorney Needs to Know
18
Crowell & Moring LLP. Class Actions: Rethinking the Class Actions Strategy
19
Insurance Journal. Class Action Litigation Trends
20
Expert Institute. Top Class Action Settlements
21
LawInfo. Advantages and Disadvantages of Class Action Lawsuits
22
Robins Cloud LLP. Pros and Cons of Joining a Class Action Lawsuit