Fenwick, Prager Metis to pay $66M over FTX claims

Fenwick & West agreed to pay $54 million and audit firm Prager Metis $11.75 million to resolve class claims that they helped enable Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud at FTX, a filing submitted Friday in U.S. District Court in Miami shows. Former NBA player Udonis Haslem will pay $420,000 as part of the same settlement package.

The filings fold three additional defendants into a class action that seeks to represent anyone who held crypto or fiat on FTX, enrolled in a yield product, or bought FTT, the exchange’s native token. Plaintiffs’ lawyers say the class could include millions of users; FTX reported more than 1.2 million users at its peak.

Customers’ lawyers told the court that Fenwick ‘helped to craft and implement strategies that facilitated FTX’s fraud.' Fenwick disputed the allegations in a statement, asserting it was not aware of the fraud, stands by the integrity of its legal work and denies wrongdoing. Prager Metis agreed to the $11.75 million payment, and Haslem’s payment reflects his role as a paid promoter of the exchange.

The plaintiffs’ team, led by attorneys Adam Moskowitz and David Boies, also asked the court to replace the FTX bankruptcy estate as the administrator of settlement payments, proposing JND Legal Administration to run the claims process. The proposed allocation plan would subtract any amounts claimants have already recovered through the bankruptcy from the value of their lost assets.

The plan values crypto losses using CoinGecko prices as of May 14 and treats fiat losses separately. FTT will be credited only at the documented purchase price, and any FTT received at no cost will be assigned zero value.

These agreements follow an earlier wave of class settlements the court preliminarily approved between December 2024 and July 2025. The prior deals covered Sam Bankman-Fried, former Alameda Research executives including Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh, co-founder Gary Wang, former Fenwick partner Dan Friedberg, and a group of celebrity promoters including Shaquille O’Neal.

A group of 18 individuals and three corporate plaintiffs from Hong Kong, Singapore, the U.K., the EU and South Korea, who say they have more than $500 million in combined losses, are pursuing a separate lawsuit and asked the court not to fold their claims into the class until a pending motion is decided. Separately, Fenwick faces a $525 million civil suit filed in Washington, D.C., by 20 FTX victims alleging malpractice, fraud and gross negligence; that case is not resolved by the settlements.

U.S. District Judge K. Michael Moore must grant preliminary approval before the second-wave deals take effect. Plaintiffs requested a final approval hearing 90 days after preliminary approval. The FTX bankruptcy estate has returned more than $5 billion to creditors and has said it intends to make most customers whole on a dollar basis. Sam Bankman-Fried is serving a 25-year federal prison sentence after being convicted of stealing about $8 billion from customers and is appealing his conviction.

Fenwick, Moskowitz and the attorney representing the foreign plaintiffs did not immediately respond to requests for comment.