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The Impact of Fee Arrangement on Lawyer Effort

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2024

Herbert M. Kritzer ,
William L.F. Felstiner ,
Austin Sarat  and
David M. Trubek
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Abstract

This paper focuses on the impact of fee arrangement on the amount of time lawyers are likely to devote to civil cases (“effort”). Drawing upon data collected by the Civil Litigation Research Project, we compare the behavior of lawyers working on an hourly fee basis with the behavior of contingent fee lawyers. Like previous work on this issue, the paper finds that fee arrangement does influence the amount of effort lawyers devote to a given case. However, contrary to previous work, the analysis indicates that the effect is not a simple effect on hours worked but a more complex effect on a number of aspects of lawyers' behavior. Together these produce an effect on hours that varies by size of case. For modest cases (with stakes of $6,000 or less), contingent fee lawyers spend less time on a case than hourly fee lawyers. Yet we find no statistically significant evidence of a differential in effort for larger cases but rather an indication that, if there is an effect, it may be in the opposite direction.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , 1985 , pp. 251 - 278
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 by The Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

*

This is a revision of a paper presented at the Midwest Political Science Association annual meeting, Palmer House Hotel, Chicago, Illinois, April 12-14, 1984. The analysis is drawn from the work of the Civil Litigation Research Project, which was sponsored by United States Justice Department Contract JAOIA-79-0040; additional support was provided by the Research Committee of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Graduate School and by the University of Wisconsin Law School. We acknowledge editorial and other assistance from two anonymous reviewers and Felicity Skidmore.

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