Illinoisans seeking a cut of $100 million from Google under a prominent class action lawsuit settlement should again expect to receive a significantly smaller slice than originally thought, with lawyers now estimating class members should expect about $95 each, down by at least 50% from initial estimates.
Lawyers who led the lawsuit, however, will continue to receive $35 million in fees.
Last week, Cook County Circuit Judge Anna Loftus signed off on a report submitted by lawyers for the plaintiffs in a long-running class action lawsuit brought against Google under Illinois’ stringent biometrics privacy law.
Robert Ahdoot
| ahdootwolfson.com
Under the new process, they said, nearly 167,000 more people had been added to the roster of eligible claimants.
This, they said, dropped the total per person payout from the settlement from about $154 to $95. And that was down further still from initial estimates of $200 to $400 per person reported by the plaintiffs’ lawyers when the settlement was first announced.
The settlement was unveiled in the spring of 2022, appearing to end nearly six years of litigation. The case against Google stood as one of the longest running class action lawsuits under the law known as the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.
It was brought on behalf of a group of plaintiffs represented by attorney Robert Ahdoot, of the firm of Ahdoot & Wolfson, of Burbank , California, and others with him.
The lawsuit was similar to an earlier case brought by other law firms against Facebook. The lawsuit accused Google, through its Photos app, of improperly scanning the faces of people imaged in photos uploaded to the app, without first obtaining written consent from those people and without providing certain notices concerning its biometric data retention policies, as allegedly required by the BIPA law.
In the years since the lawsuits against Facebook and Google were first filed, the number of class action lawsuits brought under the BIPA law have exploded, now numbering in the thousands.
While some of the BIPA-related lawsuits have targeted tech giants like Facebook and Google, most have taken aim at employers and businesses of all kinds and sizes in Illinois. The lawsuits carry huge risks for companies. Under the BIPA law, plaintiffs can demand damages of $1,000 to $5,000 per violation.
Under recent Illinois Supreme Court rulings, those damages can be calculated based on each time someone scans their so-called biometric identifiers. For example, an employer who requires workers to scan their fingerprints on a so-called biometric punch clock could be required to pay up to $5,000 each time a worker scans a fingerprint when beginning and ending a work shift, or when accessing a secure computer system or secured space within a workplace.
When multiplied against a full work force, the damages can quickly climb into the many millions or even billions of dollars.
To date, Illinois lawmakers have proven reluctant to back reforms to the law, despite outcry from the business community over its potentially staggering costs and harm to the state’s economy.
Trial lawyers, however, have found the law to be a boon, allowing them to lay claim to large paydays from huge settlements, despite their cases alleging no one suffered any actual harm from the alleged violations of the BIPA law.
Faced with massive financial risk, most businesses targeted by such lawsuits have opted to settle, rather than take their chances before a jury.
Facebook chose that route, estimating it could have faced payouts of $5 billion or more.
In the case against Facebook, different plaintiffs also had accused the social media giant of wrongly scanning and storing the facial geometry of people featured in uploaded photos. Facebook famously settled for $650 million, generating payments of $400 each to Illinoisans who had Facebook accounts. Attorneys received $97.5 million in fees from that settlement, or about 15% of the total.
In the case against Google, plaintiffs’ lawyers had initially said eligible claimants in Illinois could expect a similar per person payout. But they advised the final amount could be less, depending on how many people successfully verified claims for a share of the settlement.
In a court order last September, billed as a “final judgment,” Judge Loftus signed off on final payments of about $150 per person, and $35 million in fees. That represented a cut from the $40 million plaintiffs’ lawyers had originally requested.
Specifically, they took aim at supposed “anti-fraud” measures instituted by the settlement administrators, requiring claimants to take the additional step of submitting photo identification to verify their identity before they could collect a cut of the $65 million pot remaining after attorney fees.
In court filings, attorneys with the Edelson firm argued the additional screening was designed to block out as many as 1.2 million additional class members. If those who had been allegedly improperly excluded were counted, the Edelson lawyers estimated the final payout per claim would have actually been about $37 per person.
Ultimately, the judge agreed to allow Ahdoot and his colleagues to conduct additional screening, opening up the settlement one more time this spring to review more additional claimants.
That resulted in adding nearly 167,000 more people to the total class of Illinois residents whose likenesses were included in photos uploaded to Google Photos, bringing the total size of the plaintiffs’ class to 687,484 eligible claimants, and dropping the final per person payout to $95.
The additional court challenges and review process, however, did not assail nor decrease the $35 million Ahdoot and his colleagues would receive from the settlement.
Google has been represented in the case by attorneys Susan D. Fahringer, Ryan Spear and Kathleen A. Stetsko, of Perkins Coie, of Seattle and Chicago.