CONCORD, New Hampshire (AP) — Lawyers who won a class action suit against Tyco International and PricewaterhouseCoopers will earn almost half a billion dollars.

Their portion of the $3.2 billion settlement, the third-largest securities class action recovery in history, includes $464 million in fees and $29 million for expenses.

In the order issued by U.S. District Judge Paul Barbadoro, the three co-lead counsels' request for legal fees totaling 14.5 percent of the multi-billion dollar settlement, plus expenses, citing the length and complexity of the case, and lawyers' success in winning the largest cash payment from a corporate defendant in the history of securities litigation.

"This was an enormously complex case, and counsel assumed substantial risk in pursuing it. The number of mergers and acquisitions that were scrutinised and the novelty and difficulty of the legal issues that were presented leave this case with few comparable precedents," Barbadoro wrote.

The three co-lead counsels are Jay Eisenhofer of Grant & Eisenhofer P.A., in Wilmington, Delawarel; Sanford Dumain of Milberg Weiss LLP, in New York; and Richard Schiffrin of Schiffrin, Barroway, Topaz & Kessler LLP, in Radnor, Pennsylvania.

Tyco contributed $2.975 billion to a cash fund to pay claims filed by shareholders against the company over actions by former chief executive L. Dennis Kozlowski and other top officers convicted of looting Tyco and inflating its value; accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers paid $225 million for fraud, bringing the total to $3.2 billion.

"In all, the proposed settlement is the third largest securities class action recovery in history, behind only Enron and Worldcom," Barbadoro wrote.

The settlement covers investors who acquired Tyco securities from December 13, 1999, to June 7, 2002.

Tyco has its operating headquarters in West Windsor, New Jersey, and is nominally headquartered in Bermuda. The lawsuits were filed in New Hampshire because the company was formerly headquartered in Exeter.

The shareholders' suit had claimed that as Tyco's independent auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers failed to uncover accounting fraud at the conglomerate. According to the shareholders' legal team, Tyco overstated its income during that period by $5.8 billion.

Barbadoro's 67-page order also gave a progress report on the class action settlement.

Money will be divided among shareholders after attorney's fees are deducted. Jay Eisenhofer, one of the three co-lead counsels in the case, has said money could be distributed as early as 2008.