Maui Wildfire Attorney Fees Reach Hawaii's High Court — and $4 Billion in Payouts Waits

The largest mass tort settlement in Hawaii's history is sitting still because nobody can agree what the lawyers are worth. On 15 September 2026 the Hawaii Supreme Court heard roughly an hour of argument on whether Maui Circuit Judge Peter Cahill had the power to cut Maui wildfire attorney fees to a sliding scale of 3% to 10% and to carve $222 million out of the $4.037 billion global settlement as a common benefit fund — and until the court answers, not one of the 21,750 claimants from the 8 August 2023 Lahaina fire receives a dollar.

The five justices who heard it — Kevin Morikone, Todd Eddins, Sabrina McKenna, Lisa Ginoza and Taryn Tomasa — did not rule from the bench. What they decide will settle a question that state courts handling aggregate disaster litigation have mostly avoided: whether a trial judge supervising a settlement may override the contingency fee a claimant agreed to in a signed retainer agreement, and impose a fee schedule of the court's own design across every firm in the case.

What Judge Cahill's order did to Maui wildfire attorney fees

Cahill's order of 5 June 2026 replaced individually negotiated contingency fees with a court-set schedule keyed to when a lawyer was retained and how far the case had progressed. Most attorneys who signed clients after the global settlement was reached on 19 August 2024 are limited to 3%; most who were retained before that date may take up to 8.33%; the handful whose cases had already been set for trial may take up to 10%; and anything above those tiers — capped at 12.5% — requires a motion, a hearing, and a finding of extraordinary circumstances.

Layered on top is the $222 million common benefit fund. That money is not allocated to any claimant's own lawyer by default. Hawaii-based counsel apply for a share proportionate to the work they did that benefited the whole claimant population, and Cahill decides the allocation. The structure is familiar from federal multidistrict litigation practice and almost unheard of in a state-court settlement of this kind, which is why coverage at the time described it as unprecedented.

The order landed hard because of what preceded it. Plaintiffs' counsel across the litigation had been positioned to collect roughly $1 billion in aggregate fees. Cahill's schedule cuts that to a fraction of it. Hawaii law is generally understood to permit up to 25% in litigation of this type — a ceiling that appears in HRS § 662-12 for claims against the State under the State Tort Liability Act, and the State of Hawaii is among the settling defendants — so the order operates as a reduction of roughly two-thirds against the statutory maximum.

Maui wildfire attorney fees by the numbers: $4.037 billion, $222 million, and what a point is worth

The arithmetic is worth doing explicitly, because no account of this dispute in the general press does it.

Component	Figure	Share of gross settlement
Global settlement fund	$4,037,000,000	100%
Aggregate fee exposure at the 25% statutory ceiling	~$1,009,000,000	25.0%
Common benefit fund set by the 5 June order	$222,000,000	5.5%
Individual fee, post-settlement retention	up to 3%	3.0%
Individual fee, pre-settlement retention	up to 8.33%	8.33%
Individual fee, case set for trial before settlement	up to 10%	10.0%
Individual fee, extraordinary circumstances on motion	up to 12.5%	12.5%
Blended maximum, pre-settlement retention plus assessment	8.33% + 5.5%	13.83%
Common benefit fund per claimant, across 21,750 claimants	~$10,200	—

Two figures in that table do most of the work. The first is 5.5%: that is the common benefit fund expressed as a holdback assessment against the gross recovery, and it is the number that makes this order legible to anyone who has practiced in an MDL. The second is 13.83%, the most a typical early-retained firm can take once the assessment is applied — a little over half the statutory ceiling, and the reason the plaintiffs' bar treated the order as an existential ruling rather than a routine reasonableness review.

The claimant-side mirror image is straightforward. Across 94,816 claims filed by 21,750 claimants as of mid-April, every percentage point of aggregate fee is worth roughly $40.4 million to the class of claimants as a whole, or about $1,856 per claimant. The gap between the order's blended 13.83% and the 25% ceiling is therefore on the order of $451 million — which is why the Star-Advertiser reported that a successful appeal could redirect close to $1 billion from victims to attorneys, and why the fee fight has become, in practical terms, a fight about the settlement itself.

Who appealed the Maui wildfire attorney fee order, and on what grounds

The appeal was brought by three Hawaii attorneys — Anthony Ranken of Ranken & Shnider in Wailuku, Alex Edrenkin of the PacLaw Group in Honolulu, and John Thickstun of Montegna & Thickstun — together with Michael Adrian Kahaleala Bates, who lost a home in Lahaina in the fire. (One account has described all four as attorneys; two independent reports identify Bates as a fire victim, and this piece follows them.) It was filed with the Intermediate Court of Appeals on 2 July 2026 and elevated to the Hawaii Supreme Court on 5 August 2026.

The grounds are jurisdictional before they are substantive. The appellants' position, as argued by Samuel Shnider, is that Cahill had no authority to set fees under the settlement agreement at all: the global settlement did not commit fee-setting to the court, the retainer agreement between each claimant and each firm is an ordinary contract, and the statutory ceiling — not a judge's discretion — marks the outer limit. Shnider also argued that the $222 million common benefit fund was foreclosed by a case management order Cahill himself had entered early in the litigation, a point the appellants treat as dispositive on its own.

The rhetorical frame was sharper than the doctrine. "This order is tort reform from the bench," Shnider told the court, adding that "the fee order must be vacated." He pressed the consequentialist case as well: an order of this kind, he argued, "jeopardizes access to justice for the people of Hawaii in the next disaster," because firms will not underwrite catastrophic-loss litigation on a fee that a judge may rewrite after the recovery is secured.

Can a judge cut a contingency fee below what the retainer agreement says?

In a Hawaii tort case, yes — HRS § 607-15.5 provides that in tort actions where judgment is entered, attorneys' fees for both sides are limited to a reasonable amount as approved by the court, and where a tort action settles, either party may ask the court to approve the fee. The live question on appeal is not whether that power exists but how far it reaches: whether it permits a court to move from case-by-case reasonableness review, on request, to a schedule imposed across an entire aggregate settlement without any party asking for one.

That distinction is the whole appeal. Reasonableness review under § 607-15.5 is a retail power: a claimant or a defendant raises a fee, the court examines it, and the court approves or trims it. What Cahill did is wholesale — a schedule binding every firm and every claimant in the litigation, adopted as part of settlement administration. The State Tort Liability Act ceiling in § 662-12 sits alongside it, capping fees at 25% of the amount recovered in claims against the State, and the appellants read the two together as marking a boundary the court crossed.

The counter-position, which the order itself embodies, is that a court supervising an aggregate settlement is doing something no individual fee review can do: preventing the sum of individually reasonable contingency fees from becoming a collectively unreasonable charge against a fund created for disaster victims, most of whom will not be made whole. That is recognizably the logic of the common fund doctrine, under which a court administering a pooled recovery has inherent authority over the fees charged against it. Whether Hawaii's statutes leave room for that inherent authority, or displace it, is what the justices took under advisement.

How the $222 million common benefit fund compares with an MDL holdback

The comparison nobody in the SERP makes is the one that tells a practitioner most. In federal multidistrict litigation, a transferee judge routinely orders a percentage of every gross recovery held back to fund a common benefit fund for leadership counsel. Reported assessments run from about 3% to 11%, most commonly landing between 4% and 8%. In the 3M combat arms earplug litigation the holdback was set at 9%, funding a fee pool of roughly $540.9 million.

Against that benchmark, Cahill's 5.5% assessment is unremarkable — below the midpoint of the ordinary MDL range and well under the 3M figure. It is the setting, not the size, that is novel. Common benefit assessments are a creature of MDL practice, where a transferee court's authority over pretrial proceedings and the common fund doctrine have been understood for decades to support them. Importing the device into a consolidated state-court proceeding, over the objection of firms who never bargained for it, is the step the Hawaii Supreme Court is being asked to bless or reverse.

Feature	Typical federal MDL	Cahill's 5 June 2026 order
Assessment rate	3%–11%, commonly 4%–8%	5.5% of gross
Mechanism	Holdback from gross recovery before distribution	Fund carved from the global settlement
Who is compensated	Leadership and participating counsel for common work	Hawaii-based counsel who apply, pro rata to work done
Individual fee also capped?	Rarely; the retainer usually controls	Yes — 3% / 8.33% / 10%, 12.5% on motion
Source of authority	Transferee court's pretrial authority plus the common fund doctrine	Contested: HRS § 607-15.5 plus inherent settlement-supervision power

The second-to-last row is where the Maui order goes further than MDL practice. A federal common benefit order takes a slice off the top and leaves the claimant's own contingency fee to the retainer agreement. Cahill did both — assessed the fund and rewrote the individual fees. An MDL claimant paying a 40% contingency fee into a 9% holdback bears a far heavier total fee load than a Maui claimant will under this order, which is the point the appellants have the hardest time answering.

Why Maui wildfire settlement payments are still frozen

No settlement money can be distributed while the fee appeal is pending. More than $1.1 billion is already sitting in a Bank of America trust account as the first of four annual installments; the first award notices reached survivors on 18 June 2026; and the claims administrator has said it expects processing and payment of that first installment to take roughly six months once it can begin. None of that can start until the Hawaii Supreme Court rules.

That is the third delay in a settlement that has been delayed repeatedly. Payments were projected to reach victims as early as April 2026, then July or August. The August reporting described them as delayed again, this time by the fee appeal specifically. Three years and six weeks after the fire, the fund exists, the claims are quantified, and the distribution mechanics are built — and the sole obstacle is a dispute among lawyers about lawyers' compensation.

The timeline, compressed:

Date	Event
8 August 2023	Lahaina fire kills 102 people and destroys more than 2,000 structures
19 August 2024	Global settlement reached; $4.037 billion across seven defendant groups
February 2026	Hawaii Supreme Court clears the appellate obstacle to distribution
5 June 2026	Cahill enters the fee order: 3%–12.5% tiers plus a $222 million common benefit fund
18 June 2026	First settlement award notices reach survivors
2 July 2026	Fee order appealed to the Intermediate Court of Appeals
5 August 2026	Appeal elevated to the Hawaii Supreme Court; payments halt
15 September 2026	Oral argument; no ruling from the bench; matter under advisement

What it means for the plaintiffs' bar, claimants and settlement drafters

For the plaintiffs' bar, the exposure is precedential rather than local. A state high court holding that a trial judge supervising an aggregate settlement may set a fee schedule across all counsel, unprompted and after the recovery is secured, gives every state-court judge handling a wildfire, hurricane, pipeline or chemical-release inventory a template. The rate risk in a disaster mass tort would then sit not with the claimant or the defendant but with the court, and would be unpriced at the moment the retainer agreement is signed. Firms underwriting catastrophic-loss inventories against borrowed capital would have to model a fee that can be reduced by two-thirds after the work is done — which is the access-to-justice argument the appellants made, stated as a financing problem rather than a rhetorical one.

For claimants, the immediate effect is the opposite of what a fee reduction implies. The order directs several hundred million dollars toward the claimant population, and the appeal from it is what is currently keeping every dollar of that population's recovery in trust. Anyone reading the 5.5% assessment as money taken from victims has the sign wrong: the assessment reallocates fees among firms, while the tier caps reallocate value from firms to claimants.

For drafters of aggregate settlement documents, the lesson is procedural and immediate. The global settlement here did not allocate fee-setting authority to the court, and the parties are now three months into an appeal about who holds a power nobody wrote down. A settlement agreement resolving a consolidated inventory should say, in terms, whether the supervising court sets fees, whether a common benefit fund may be established and on what assessment, whether individual contingency fee caps apply, and what happens to distribution if any of it is appealed. A distribution mechanism that halts entirely on a fee appeal — with no severance, no escrow of the contested amount, and no partial-payment carve-out — converts a dispute among counsel into a freeze on every claimant's money. That design choice is avoidable and was not avoided.

For defendants and their insurers, the case is a reminder that funding a qualified settlement fund does not end the exposure to delay. Hawaiian Electric, at just under $2 billion, Kamehameha Schools at about $872 million, the State at roughly $800 million, and the remaining defendants have all performed; the money is in trust; and the litigation they settled in August 2024 is still generating appellate proceedings in late 2026.

FAQ

How much are Maui wildfire attorneys being paid from the $4 billion settlement?

Under Judge Cahill's 5 June 2026 order, up to 3% for most attorneys retained after 19 August 2024, up to 8.33% for most retained before that date, up to 10% where the case was already set for trial, and up to 12.5% only on motion in extraordinary circumstances — plus a separate $222 million common benefit fund, equal to 5.5% of the gross settlement, allocated by the court among Hawaii-based counsel who apply. Before the order, aggregate fees were on track to approach $1 billion.

What is the $222 million common benefit fund in the Maui wildfire settlement?

It is a pool carved out of the $4.037 billion settlement to pay lawyers whose work benefited all 21,750 claimants rather than only their own clients. Hawaii-based counsel apply for a share in proportion to the common work they performed, and Judge Cahill determines the allocation. At 5.5% of gross it is comparable to a federal MDL holdback assessment, which typically runs 3% to 11%.

When will Maui wildfire victims receive their settlement money?

No distribution can occur until the Hawaii Supreme Court decides the fee appeal argued on 15 September 2026, and the court did not rule from the bench. More than $1.1 billion is held in trust as the first of four annual installments, and the administrator has estimated roughly six months to process and pay that first installment once distribution is permitted to begin.

Can a judge override a signed contingency fee agreement in Hawaii?

HRS § 607-15.5 limits attorneys' fees in tort actions to a reasonable amount as approved by the court where judgment is entered, and allows either party to request court approval of fees where a tort action settles. The contested question is whether that power supports a court-imposed schedule binding every firm in an aggregate settlement, as against case-by-case review on request. HRS § 662-12 separately caps fees at 25% of the amount recovered in claims against the State.

Who appealed the Maui wildfire attorney fee order?

Attorneys Anthony Ranken (Ranken & Shnider, Wailuku), Alex Edrenkin (PacLaw Group, Honolulu) and John Thickstun (Montegna & Thickstun), together with Michael Adrian Kahaleala Bates, who lost a home in Lahaina. They filed with the Intermediate Court of Appeals on 2 July 2026 and the matter was elevated to the Hawaii Supreme Court on 5 August 2026.

What did the Hawaii Supreme Court decide about the Maui wildfire attorney fees?

Nothing yet. The five-justice panel heard about an hour of argument on 15 September 2026, questioned counsel closely on the governing case law and statutes, and took the matter under advisement. Settlement payments remain frozen until a decision issues.