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<i>Counsel Concerns</i><br>Athletes' Lawyer Sues Co-Counsel Over Fees from Video Game Cases
A New Jersey lawyer claims in a legal complaint that the law firm Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro shortchanged him on fees from a $60 million settlement of class action suits that had been brought behalf of college athletes over the use of their names and likenesses in video games. McIlwain v. Berman, 1:2017cv01257.
Timothy McIlwain of Linwood, NJ, claims Hagens Berman breached a contract between plaintiffs' lawyers concerning sharing of fees, in his lawsuit against the firm and three principals that he has filed in federal court in the District of New Jersey. The suit names managing partner Steven Berman and partners Leonard Aragon and Robert Carey as defendants. Aragon said prior to seeing the lawsuit that any claim contradicting a Northern District of California judge who awarded fees in the class action litigation would be “frivolous.”
McIlwain's suit claims Hagens Berman breached a contract it entered into with McIlwain concerning division of fees from class action litigation against the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and video game maker Electronic Arts (EA). Roughly 24,000 class members received payments averaging $1,600 each for appearing in a series of video games produced by EA between 2003 and 2014. In July 2015, a U.S. district judge in San Francisco approved the $60 million settlement, which was brought on behalf of college football and basketball players who said their rights of publicity were violated by unauthorized depictions of them in video games.
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