Ruling on a contentious fee dispute, a federal appeals court on Wednesday upheld an award of more than $3.5 million in fees and interest to a California-based lawyer for his work on a historic class action that led to a federal government payout of $3.4 billion to hundreds of thousands of Native Americans.

With its ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia found that a lower court made the right call when it awarded Mark Brown $2.88 million in fees, plus a little less than $736,294 in prejudgment interest. The D.C. Circuit’s opinion punctuates a fee dispute that pitted Brown against other plaintiffs lawyers in a long-running legal saga over the federal government’s management of Native American land trusts.