contingency fee reform is
We interrupt our poetry for a pet project: contingency fee reform. Tomorrow, Point of Law is beginning a Featured Discussion where “Two of the nation’s leading experts on legal ethics, Lester Brickman and Richard Painter, will discuss potential ways to improve the legal system through reforming the way lawyers charge contingency fees.”
Despite it’s current haiku format, you’ll find much on the standard contingency fee at this website, as it has been an obsession of the Editor for years. In the posting Suggestions for the ABA Contingency Fee Task Force (Jan. 7, 2004), there is a good summary of ethicalEsq‘s position and arguments, with many links.
I’m no ethics professor or bigwig (I only play one on the net), but I think I know the very best and quickest way to achieve contingency fee reform: inform the public — let consumers/clients know (1) they can and should negotiate for a fair contingency fee; (2) [click here for the rest of this posting, ]
Update (Aug. 18, 2004): At Point of Law, Prof. Richard Painter makes very good sense with his New American Rule for Contingency Fees, originally described in this article.
“In essence, the New American rule requires the lawyer charging a contingent fee to say to the client in advance that “my fee will be X% of any judgment or settlement in this case but will be no higher than Y dollars per hour.” Under the proposal, the lawyer and client are free to agree on any numbers for X and Y that they want (subject of course to the existing provision in ethics rules and thus implied in the retainer agreement that a lawyer’s fees must ultimately be reasonable). . . . [T]he lawyer who chooses to charge on a contingency must specify both X and Y. After the case is over, the client has the option of paying the lower of X or Y.
August 16, 2004
to reform, inform
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