By David Thomas and Mike Scarcella

Aug 20 (Reuters) - (Billable Hours is Reuters’ weekly report on lawyers and money. Please send tips or suggestions to D.Thomas@thomsonreuters.com.)

Lawyers are lining up in Illinois for a big test of the state’s far-reaching data privacy law in the AI era. Nine leading tech companies, including Apple, Amazon, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia and Samsung, are facing lawsuits in Chicago federal court alleging they violated Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) by using thousands of hours of recorded human voices without permission to power their AI systems.

Ross Kimbarovsky of Loevy & Loevy is representing the plaintiffs – a group of journalists, podcasters and audiobook narrators – in the proposed class action lawsuits. He said each of the defendants faces hundreds of millions of dollars in potential damages.

“They harvested as much information as they could from every source imaginable,” said Kimbarovsky.

He said his Chicago firm, which specializes in civil rights law, will be paid on a contingency basis if the cases are successful. Kimbarovsky declined to detail the size of the firm’s potential stake.

BIPA contains statutory penalties for companies that collect biometric data from workers and consumers without informing them, obtaining consent or detailing the scope and duration of the collection. The law also requires companies to develop a written policy that includes guidelines for destroying such data and prohibits them from selling it. Illinois narrowed the penalties under BIPA in 2024, following a crush of lawsuits invoking the law, but companies still face a $1,000 penalty for a negligent violation, or $5,000 for an intentional or reckless violation, applied per victim and for each of the law’s subsections. The plaintiffs, who include prominent Chicago journalist Carol Marin and Pulitzer Prize winners Yohance Lacour and Alison Flowers, allege that the companies each violated multiple provisions of BIPA as well as state laws governing publicity, consumer fraud and deceptive practices.

The lawsuits do not allege copyright violations, unlike a wave of other cases nationwide alleging the unauthorized use of data to train AI models. The nine cases are currently spread among seven different judges at the Chicago court, although Apple last month asked for them to be consolidated before a single judge.

The tech companies deny the allegations and have assembled a phalanx of corporate defense attorneys at 10 law firms to battle the lawsuits, including Gibson Dunn for Apple, Greenberg Traurig for Samsung, Jenner & Block for Microsoft, Latham & Watkins for ElevenLabs and Meta Platforms, Morgan Lewis for Amazon, Quinn Emanuel for Alphabet and Sidley Austin for Adobe.

In a wave of motions to dismiss filed in recent days and weeks, many of the companies argued that the lawsuits are speculative and that the Illinois biometric privacy law does not apply because there’s no claim that alleged misuse of the data took place in the state.

“They allege only that their recordings are available on the internet; they do not offer any facts to support an inference that Apple used those recordings to train its technology,” Apple’s lawyers said in a filing on Monday. A Meta spokesperson said in a statement the company provides “people with information about our use of their data” and that the plaintiffs’ claims are “incorrect and should be dismissed.” An Alphabet spokesperson declined to comment. Spokespersons at the other defendants did not immediately respond to comment requests. The companies’ legal teams include a former Chicago federal judge and attorneys who specialize in BIPA claims and class action defense. Gary Feinerman, who was appointed by President Barack Obama to the federal bench in 2010 and stepped down in 2023, is on the Latham team representing ElevenLabs and Meta. Alphabet’s lineup includes Andrew Schapiro, a Quinn Emanuel partner who defended Google in a lawsuit accusing the company of collecting data from users despite their use of private-browsing in Chrome’s “Incognito” mode. Google reached a settlement that required it to destroy billions of data records but did not pay any monetary damages.

Feinerman and Schapiro did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Loevy & Loevy has brought BIPA cases before, including one against freight rail giant BNFS that settled for $75 million in 2024, and another against Motorola Solutions that settled for $47.5 million in 2025. The firm is also lead counsel on a class action lawsuit, which included BIPA violations, against facial recognition company Clearview AI.

The firm also has pending lawsuits against AI music generators that allege both BIPA and copyright claims. – Law firms mount appeal for fees in $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement A group of plaintiffs’ firms including Edelson have appealed a federal judge’s order denying them tens of millions of dollars in compensation for work they said they provided in landmark litigation accusing artificial intelligence startup Anthropic of violating authors’ copyrights.

The firms on Tuesday filed a notice of appeal to the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The filing said their appeal will focus on legal fees, following a decision by a judge in December to award fees only to the firms appointed by the court to lead the case: Susman Godfrey and Lieff Cabraser.

“A law firm cannot appoint itself class counsel by showing up. Nor can class counsel appoint someone else to do its work,” U.S. District Judge William Alsup wrote in his fee order. He said Edelson and the other firms had asked the court for a “bonanza as if they had been class counsel all along.”

Alsup called the non-appointed firms “interlopers,” and denied their bid for $75 million in legal fees from Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement fund. Edelson’s Jay Edelson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Susman and Lieff Cabraser initially sought $300 million in fees but withdrew that request after the court said it would not approve it. They later sought $187.5 million, arguing that the amount reflected the complexity of the litigation and the result achieved. U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, who took over the case this year, in July awarded the class attorneys about $101 million. Anthropic has denied any wrongdoing.

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