We really do need a lawyer here to explain why would anyone take such a case without any clearly defined monetary gains.
The lawyers will get paid their normal costs/fees at a minimum so it's not like they're working for free. Plus the press from winning the case is valuable.
They MAY be able to convince the judge to give them some additional amount based on the concept of significant benefit to shareholders, but that's much trickier here than in cases with actual financial/cash judgements, and if it's anything beyond normal and reasonable fees it certainly won't be 1/3rd of the speculative max value of the options or anything like that.
Counsel for shareholders who challenged Tesla remuneration will submit request in coming weeks
www.ft.com
Just comes up a paywall for me. But I quoted some cases from a similar article (based on the headline anyway) earlier- which mostly was just rando lawyers speculating, plus mentioning two cases I already mentioned.... though in those there was a cash judgement to split up, which is NOT the case here....from the other story in the vein (dunno if it's same as yours due to yours being paywalled)
The fee award in this case will be more challenging, however, given that Mr Musk is simply returning shares he had been granted and that no cash is changing hands between the sides
Wow, I consider it rather ironic, and truly sickening, that the same judge who decided that Elon's $55 Billion dollar payout was "outrageous and excessive" could now possibly hand over billions to the plaintiff's ambulance-chasing lawyers! What about the damage that payout does to Tesla shareholders? Can we sue them?
Again I don't think it'd be REMOTELY that big-- but the
idea of such awards is the lawyers get a fraction of the amount they SAVED (or recovered) the shareholders.
A better case for this, also involving Tesla, is the one where board members agreed to return ~735 million bucks to the company from unfair compensation... if there was no lawsuit the shareholders would have gotten $0 back... so if the lawyers were given say 73.5 million (10% of the judgement) then the shareholders STILL come out 661.5 million dollars
ahead in cash terms.... FWIW the award amount (for the lawyers) hasn't been decided on that one yet so that 10% is speculative, could be more could be less.
That's far tougher in Elons case given there's no cash involved here, just options that were never exercised and whose value can vary wildly with share price relative to when they would be exercised and thus it's harder to say what it actually "saves" the company exactly.
