OPINION AND ORDER REGARDING PLAINTIFFS’ MOTION FOR ATTORNEYS’ FEES, EXPENSES, AND INCENTIVE AWARDS Following this Court’s preliminary approval of a settlement in this pharmaceutical direct purchaser antitrust class action for $750,000,000 (Dkt. No. 947), Class counsel made a timely motion for fees, expenses and incentive awards. (ECF Nos. 925-28.) Class counsel originally sought 27.5 percent of the common fund (or an award of X), reimbursement of expenses of $5,823,928.91, and incentive awards of $150,000 for each representative plaintiff. After negotiations with an objector, class counsel reduced the request to 21 percent of the common fund, or $157,500,000; the rest of the proposal remains the same. For the following reasons, Class counsel’s motion for a fee award is granted, but the amount awarded is lower than requested. FACTUAL BACKGROUND In order to prosecute this antitrust case based on the Defendants’ alleged abuse of the generic pharmaceutical approval process under the Hatch-Waxman Act, Class counsel was required to understand: (a) various complexities of patent law, in order to show that Mylan would have prevailed in showing that the ’703 patent was not infringed, and that Forest’s patent claims as well as the patent term extension were invalid, and to rebut Forest’s arguments to the contrary; (b) the biopharmaceutical aspects of NMDA receptor antagonism; (c) the relevant aspects of FDA and CMS drug regulation, including: (i) FDA regulations regarding approval of transfers of manufacturing technology (for Lexapro) from one site to another; and (ii) CMS regulations governing the Medicaid rebate liability consequences of selling an authorized generic (Lexapro) in various ways. Class counsel then applied their knowledge of those regulations to a forensic examination of Forest’s deal valuation spreadsheets, developed a multi-input economic model to determine the earlier entry date a reverse-payment-free settlement between Forest and Mylan would have borne, determined the most likely market entry dates from ANDA approval and manufacturing capacity points of view for a host of generic companies and Forest’s “authorized generic” “but for” the reverse payment deal between Forest and Mylan, and developed economic modeling of the complicated interaction between the delay of generic Namenda IR entry from the reverse payment (on the one hand) and the hard switch product conversion enabled by that delay (on the other hand), which were interdependent sources of overcharges for direct purchasers. (See Dkt. No. 927, Gerstein Declaration, at 32.) Class counsel also had to determine the quantum of damages based on various assumptions (see id. at 67), and combine all this evidence into a trial presentation that would be comprehensible to a jury (id. at
42-47). Of course, the law or the regulations were not new to class counsel; as they have advised the court repeatedly, they litigate “pay to delay” cases as their bread and butter and have filed dozens of them over the past two decades. The case settled on the eve of trial, October 28, 2019. On December 24, 2019, Class counsel filed a fully executed version of the Settlement Agreement with the Court (ECF No. 919-1), and a Motion for Preliminary Approval (ECF No. 917) requesting that the Court preliminarily approve the Settlement, approve the form and manner of notice to the Class, and set a schedule leading up to and including a Fairness Hearing. On January 6, 2020, this Court concluded that the Settlement between the Class and Forest was arrived at by arm’s-length negotiations by highly experienced counsel after years of litigation and fell within the range of possibly approvable settlements, and preliminarily approved it. (ECF No. 920, at 6.) Concurrently, the Court appointed an escrow agent and claims administrator, approved the form and manner of notice to the Class, and set a schedule. (Id. at
