A federal judge in San Francisco has awarded approximately $147 million in legal fees to the attorneys who sued Google over privacy violations. The case stems from a jury finding that Google secretly collected app activity data from roughly 98 million people who had explicitly instructed the company to stop tracking them.

US District Judge Richard Seeborg issued the ruling in Rodriguez et al v. Google LLC, granting the fee to a legal team led by Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, Susman Godfrey LLP, and Morgan & Morgan. The award represents approximately one-third of the total common fund, which grew to about $440.3 million after pre-judgment interest was added to the original jury verdict.

The math behind the money

The underlying jury verdict, reached in September 2025, set Google's liability at $425.65 million in compensatory damages. That figure rose to roughly $440.35 million once interest was factored in. The case centered on Google's practice of collecting app activity data from users who had toggled off tracking features, affecting an estimated 98 million people.

Lead counsel David Boies billed at $2,730 per hour. Across the entire legal team, attorneys logged more than 49,670 hours of work, producing a lodestar—the baseline calculation of reasonable fees—that exceeded $56 million. The fee award of nearly $147 million represents a multiplier of roughly 2.6 times that lodestar figure, reflecting what Judge Seeborg described as the extraordinary circumstances of the case.

Judge Seeborg also acknowledged a feature common to privacy class actions: the significant gap between what lawyers earn and what individual class members receive. Each of the 98 million affected users is expected to collect less than $5.

Five years in the making

The case began in July 2020, when lead plaintiff Anibal Rodriguez filed suit against Google. The litigation spanned more than five years, including extensive discovery, pre-trial motions, and a multi-week trial that ultimately produced the nine-figure verdict.

Judge Seeborg denied Google's motion to overturn the jury's finding, reaffirming the verdict in its entirety. The ruling effectively endorsed the jury's conclusion that Google's data collection practices crossed a legal line by continuing to gather information from users who had opted out of tracking.

The verdict is one of the largest privacy judgments against Google, which in recent years has also settled other high-profile privacy class actions, including an $85 million settlement over location tracking disclosures with Arizona and a $93 million settlement with California over similar practices. The Rodriguez case stands out because it was decided by a jury rather than resolved through settlement, a relatively rare outcome in privacy litigation.

Some class members filed objections to the fee award, a frequent occurrence in large class actions where the disparity between lawyer compensation and individual recovery draws scrutiny. Judge Seeborg addressed those concerns but ultimately sided with the plaintiffs' attorneys, citing the performance of counsel and the complexity of the litigation as justification for the award. Google still has the option to appeal the verdict and the fee ruling, a step that could extend the litigation further and delay any payments to class members.