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)
Lawyer fee awards have become a hot topic in courts in Delaware, where more than 300 S&P 500 companies are incorporated. In 2023, a Delaware judge awarded $267mn to lawyers representing shareholders who agreed a $1bn settlement with Dell Technologies over its complex $24bn cash-and-stock merger with VMware. That fee has been appealed against to the Delaware Supreme Court by multiple investment funds owning VMware shares who claim the amount is excessive.
The highest fee ever awarded to plaintiffs’ lawyers in the Delaware chancery court was $285mn in 2012, which was equal to about 15 per cent of the damages in a lawsuit challenging the merger between two natural resource companies, Southern Peru and Minera Mining
In the past decade, Delaware courts have cracked down on the previous long-standing practice of awarding nominal fees in routine M&A litigation that followed many deals, resulting in little to no concrete benefit for the shareholders in question. Instead it has been willing to grant large lawyer payouts based on big judgments or settlements where lawyers involved could demonstrate how their work directly benefited plaintiffs.
It sounds to me like there is nothing stopping the judge from citing a benefit to the shareholders and ordering Tesla to pay the lawyers. The optics look horrible. I am sure that the lawyers are gonna make a case for a couple of billion and the judge may reduce it to a few hundred million. Would be interesting if Tesla indeed goes through a HQ relocation before that and refuses to pay.