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February 14-15 -- $1,000/hour for shareholder class lawyers. Last month a federal judge "awarded $24.3 million in attorney's fees -- 30 percent of an $82.5 million settlement -- to the team of plaintiffs' lawyers in the class-action shareholder's suit against Aetna Inc." Attorneys from Savett Frutkin Podell & Ryan and the law offices of Bernard M. Gross, both of Philadelphia, and New York's Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach claimed to have spent a necessary 22,000 hours on a settled case accusing Aetna of painting an overly rosy picture of its merger with managed-care giant U.S. Healthcare in 1996, a merger that worked out less well in practice. Even accepting the 22,000-hour claim at face value, the fee request works out to more than $1,000 an hour, but Judge John Padova declared that it would be "arbitrary" to give the lawyers any less. At one point the underlying suit was thrown out on summary judgment, but the lawyers got it revived. (Shannon P. Duffy, "Federal Judge Awards $24.3 Million in Fees to Attorneys of Aetna Shareholders", Legal Intelligencer (Philadelphia), Jan. 9).