“BLOATED BILLING”: Court Questions Billing Entries by TCPA Class Counsel–Calls Their Litigation Tactics “Muddled and Unfocused”–But Still Awards $5,000,000.00 in Fees

Imagine a federal judge calling your litigation tactics “muddled and unfocused” and chastising you for your “bloated billing”– and then awarding you $5MM anyway.

Eesh.

That just happened in the case of Bumpas v. Realogy Holdings and it underscores just how valuable TCPA class litigation can be for the plaintiff’s bar– even when they do a bad job they can still get paid a heap (although, for the record, class counsel still smashed Defendant’s #biglaw counsel in this one).

There– you may recall– a massive TCPA class was certified relate to Coldwell Banker-affiliated real estate agent using certain dialers. The case settled for $20MM– but that’s old news. 

The new news is that Plaintiff’s counsel in that suit– the irredeemable Avi Kauffman and co.–just recovered $5MM in fees on the case! But not before the court lambasted their billing practices.

In Bumpas v. Realogy Holdings, 2026 WL 765101 (N.D. Cal. March 18, 2026) the court analyzed the plaintiff’s fee petition that sought fully $9.7MM in fees. The Court denied that figure, but did award $5MM.

In analyzing the value of the services performed the Court questioned the class counsel purportedly spending over 10,000 hours prosecuting the case.

Pause.

I must say this case was filed back in 2019 and litigated hotly for at least 5 years. So its not as if the case reached a steamlined resolution.

But even at 2,000 hours a year that mean class counsel claims the equivalent of one lawyer working full time on this case and no other cases every day for the entire stretch of the case. I can see what the Court was incredulous.

Here are the court’s words:

“There are problems that undermine the request of a 30% cut for the attorneys. To start, the amount of attorney time billed here is astronomically high… Plaintiffs did not justify the expenditure of over 10,000 attorney hours on it, or plausibly explain why such a mammoth number of billing hours might have been warranted. A small negative multiplier on the lodestar does not cure the time excesses.”

Ok, blunt but not too bad.

Luckily, it gets worse:

“The bloated billing hours reflect the inefficiencies in handling this case on the part of plaintiffs’ counsel. As the long ECF docket indicates, and the Court’s experience confirms, the prosecution of plaintiffs’ claims was muddled and unfocused. This culminated in a highly unusual request by plaintiffs, at a late stage in the case, to “modify” a class definition that they had successfully argued for. See Dkt. No. 390. The proposed modification raised a serious question about the reliability of the expert witness opinions tendered by plaintiffs, which was not apparent until plaintiffs brought the issue up. The Court granted defendants an opportunity to request decertification of some or all of the classes as developments warranted. Id. Overall, this is not a case where the performance of plaintiffs’ counsel might warrant an “upward adjustment” of the percentage of fees to 30%, as plaintiffs propose. Dkt. No. 403 at 2.

Wow.

Still the Court awarded class counsel $5,000,000–not too shabby– although the court suggested “a good argument can be made that a “benchmark” award of 25% is also too generous here.”

Ouch.

Also of note the court awarded an extraordinarily high costs and expenses award of “$898,739.46” and I am not sure why those expenses were so high.

Regardless this is yet another case that demonstrates why it is is so lucrative to be a TCPA Plaintiff’s attorney. The money these guys make is insane.

And, finishing where we started, even though the plaintiff’s lawyers didn’t bring their A game in this one it was still enough to trounce defendant’s #biglaw counsel, who were absolutely cooked in this suit.

Blind beating the blind?

Real estate agents and brokerages that want to avoid this sort of TCPA exposure would be wise to attend Law Conference of Champions May 4-6, 2026 in Irvine, CA (or virtually thanks to Caller ID Reputation). We will be discussing all the latest TCPA developments, including SMS message usage, obtaining consent, and the beauty of litigation tactics to defeat claims just like this one.

Wealthfront’s CLO Lauren Lin will be there– will you?

Chat soon.