Lawyers for Maui wildfire victims are lining up for a potential $1 billion payday, pending a ruling by Circuit Court Judge Peter Cahill. But the judge may have a say in the matter, and could reduce the amount paid to those lawyers who represented individual fire victims.
A key issue: how to reward the lawyers who spent enormous time and resources on their own dime without unfairly rewarding plaintiffs’ lawyers who may have done scant work, including some who did little more than sign up victims as clients only after other plaintiffs’ lawyers had already done the bulk of legal work and investigations — and negotiated a $4.037 billion settlement.
Hawaiʻi Attorney General Anne Lopez is calling on Circuit Court Judge Peter Cahill to take a hard look at fees paid to attorneys for victims of the 2023 Maui wildfires, arguing, “Hawaiʻi law squarely authorizes — and indeed obligates — judicial oversight to ensure that attorneys’ fees awarded to counsel are reasonable and not excessive.” (David Croxford/Civil Beat/2025)
Cahill will hold a hearing on Friday where the lead plaintiffs’ lawyers are expected to make their case justifying a big payday.
The issue is important to the wildfire victims because the amounts paid to lawyers comes out of the pool of money to compensate the victims.
It’s also important to taxpayers, who are on the hook for the state’s $807.5 million portion of the settlement. Accordingly, Attorney General Anne Lopez has stepped in to ask Cahill to take a close look at the lawyers’ fees and decide a fair way to dole them out.
Which Law Will Apply?
Hawaiʻi has two main statutes addressing the fees lawyers can charge. One law, dealing with tort cases such as the Maui wildfire litigation, is strict. It says “attorneys’ fees for both the plaintiff and the defendant shall be limited to a reasonable amount as approved by the court having jurisdiction of the action.”
Another statute, which the state’s lawyers cite in their brief, gives the judge more leeway: a discretionary power to determine reasonable fees with a cap of 25% of the judgment, which in the wildfire case would be over $1 billion.
“Hawaiʻi law squarely authorizes — and indeed obligates — judicial oversight to ensure that attorneys’ fees awarded to counsel are reasonable and not excessive,” the state’s lawyers argue in a brief filed with Cahill.
The plaintiffs’ lawyers don’t dispute that Cahill can choose to limit their fees. But, the plaintiffs’ liaison counsel — Maui lawyers Cynthia Wong, Jan Apo and Jake Lowenthal and Jesse Creed, a Los Angeles-based wildfire litigation lawyer — are asking Cahill to consider the work they’ve done “to effectively and successfully pursue justice for the victims of the Maui Fires.”
They are asking the judge to “consider all of these factors and circumstances in the exercise of its sound discretion in the award of attorneys’ fees herein.”
Plaintiffs’ Lawyers Bear Huge Risks — And Costs
Plaintiffs’ lawyers generally take on the expenses related to handling tort cases at no cost to their clients, with the agreement that the lawyers will get paid only if their clients win, with the lawyers’ compensation coming out of what the lawyers recover for the clients.
In the context of a complicated mass injury case, the plaintiffs’ lawyers must extend enormous amounts of time and money with no guarantee that they’ll get paid.
The Maui litigation was no exception. In their brief, the plaintiffs’ lawyers outline what went into the case: investigating the origins of the fires, debunking Hawaiian Electric Co.’s initial assertions that it wasn’t to blame, reviewing documents, taking depositions, hiring experts and preparing witnesses for trials if they came to pass.
The lawyers also engaged in a lengthy, court-ordered mediation process that led to the settlement with some of Hawaiʻi’s most powerful institutions. The settlement includes $1.99 billion from Hawaiian Electric Co. and $875.2 million from Kamehameha Schools.
Another major complication involved how to deal with insurers who didn’t want to be part of the settlement.
HECO and other defendants needed assurances that the settlement would let them off the hook. But more than 190 insurers spanning the globe had paid out $2.3 billion in claims to victims and wanted to be able to sue HECO and other alleged wrongdoers to get paid back, something insurers routinely do in Hawaiʻi and elsewhere. But plaintiffs’ lawyers won a major victory by persuading the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court to rule the insurers couldn’t do that in Hawaiʻi.
Perhaps most important, the lawyers organized all of the plaintiffs into a special court proceeding administered by Cahill, bringing a semblance of order to a wildly chaotic period immediately after the fires, when Hawaiʻi’s court system was bracing for an unprecedented administrative nightmare.
The individual plaintiffs wouldn’t be in a position to be compensated, their lawyers argued, without “the substantial amount of resources that were dedicated to the advancement of the litigation, in addition to the thousands of hours spent advancing the litigation.”
Opinions Vary About Who Worked, Who Didn’t
Not everyone agrees that the plaintiffs’ lawyers all should be entitled to the maximum fees allowed by Hawaiʻi law.
Terry Revere is a Honolulu lawyer who represents people who suffered property or personal injury from the fire but didn’t hire individual lawyers. The court needed to include these so-called class-action plaintiffs in the settlement to make sure it was truly global and victims wouldn’t come along later and sue HECO or some other alleged wrongdoer.
“Certainly some attorneys worked hard to bring about this result. Others clearly did not.”
Maui victims’ class action lawyer Terry Revere
Revere and the other class plaintiffs’ lawyers have agreed to a 15% contingency fee — much lower than the 25% state law allows. He agrees that Wong and other plaintiffs’ lawyers “definitely did lots of work.”
But, he said, others didn’t. And they don’t deserve more than 15%.
“It is difficult to understand how people that were mostly just signing clients up and doing very little to actually bring about the result are going to justify charging more than that,” he said. “Certainly some attorneys worked hard to bring about this result. Others clearly did not. And I don’t see how they could possibly justify getting 25%.”
The attorney general’s lawyers haven’t suggested a percentage that the plaintiffs’ lawyers should be able to get — only that it shouldn’t be more than 25%. Instead, the state’s lawyers have argued that Cahill should adopt a process to review fees that makes sure victims get the most money and “ensures that counsel are compensated fairly for the work actually performed.”
The lawyers outline various frameworks courts have used in complex cases. Another option would be to enlist the Attorney General’s Office to lead the process for allocating the lawyers’ fees, or for Cahill to delegate authority to special masters or claims processors, subject to court review.
The ultimate goal, the attorney general said, is to “ensure that wildfire victims receive the maximum lawful benefit of the proceeds from the settlement funds while permitting counsel who performed the majority of the work to be compensated in accordance with their contributions.”
Toni Schwartz, a spokeswomen for the Attorney General’s Office, declined to comment, referring to the state’s brief. Plaintiff’s liaison counsel Creed did not respond to requests for comment.
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