A federal judge indicated three law firms seeking $75 million in attorneys’ fees from Anthropic PBC’s historic $1.5 billion copyright class action settlement with authors and publishers won’t receive any share of the pot.
“Any attorney outside Susman Godfrey and Lieff Cabraser is working for free,” Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin said Thursday during a case-management conference in San Francisco. She also indicated she will appoint a special master to probe concerns that the firms requesting attorneys’ fees struck deals on the side for a sweeter recovery than other class members.
The plaintiffs’ fees motion asked for a total of $300 million, with Susman Godfrey and Lieff Cabraser, appointed counsel for the class, getting the lion’s share of that, $225 million. Three other firms described by the motion as “coordination counsel"—Edelson PC, Oppenheim & Zebrak, and Cowan DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard LLP—would get a combined $75 million.
Both Anthropic and the judge originally assigned to the case condemned that part of the request, saying it’s unjustified to subtract from the $1.5 billion settlement because they were never designated as class counsel.
Anthropic struck the deal in August 2025 to resolve authors and publishers’ copyright lawsuit over the AI giant’s downloading of millions of pirated books, one of the largest settlements over artificial intelligence and intellectual property to date. The pact received preliminary approval in September, and final approval is pending in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
Martinez-Olguin, presiding over her first hearing in the case after Judge William Alsup’s retirement at the end of 2025, appeared to align with her predecessor. In a memo before he passed the case to Martinez-Olguin, Alsup wrote he wasn’t “merely opposing a multiplier for these three firms,” but instead “opposing any award at all for these firms.”
Alsup’s memo also raised concerns that the add-on attorneys could share some of their fees with publishers to encourage them not to opt out of the settlement, giving those publishers an unfair gain at a cost to the rest of the class.
Class counsel, Justin Nelson of Susman Godfrey, told Martinez-Olguin at the conference that he didn’t think a special master is necessary now that the firms had addressed Alsup’s concerns through declarations that there were no such untoward dealings.
“I’m going to stop you there,” Martinez-Olguin responded, saying she read the memo to suggest a special master might be needed to carefully examine Alsup’s concerns.
“We have nothing to hide,” Nelson responded. “Anyone who would give comfort to the court, we’re okay with.”
Anthropic is represented by Cooley LLP, Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP, Latham & Watkins LLP, Lex Lumina LLP, and Morrison & Foerster LLP.
The case is Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, N.D. Cal., No. 24-cv-05417, conference held 1/22/26.
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