Contingency Fees: Another Name for Champerty

Torts Contingency Fees: Another Name for Champerty The Wall Street Journal Monday, November 10, 1997

I have a rather extensive file of articles I posted on Free Republic during the Clinton Terror, and from time to time find one that still has legs. This is one.  Note: Barn Army JAG Officer Chuck Martel is of course excepted, absolved, and applauded in all his endeavors.

“ [www.FreeRepublic.com] How did a crime under common law become a common practice of modern American law? It began in 1848 with the repeal of New York state's statutes regulating lawyer's fees. Known as the Field Code, this allowed victims of then-common industrial accidents to retain a lawyer. It was, as we still hear the contingency fee described today, "the poor man's key to the courthouse door." A century and a half later, on almost any given day in America, the newspapers bear witness to the evils that jurists have been warning about for centuries and are still fighting off in the courtrooms of Europe. In Florida, a settlement was just struck in the second-hand-smoke suit against the tobacco industry. This $5 billion class-action case was begun on a contingency-fee basis in 1991 by lawyers Stanley and Susan Rosenblatt, who will get $49 million. Their 60,000 clients, so far as one can tell, will get little or no money. "Fee litigation," in which lawyers specialize in defending the fees of other lawyers, is now a thriving field. There is even a publication called Mealey's Attorneys Fees to keep tort lawyers up to speed on what other lawyers are getting, lest anyone settle beneath the going rate. At the American Bar Association meeting in August, a packed seminar called "Proving and Defending Attorney Fee Petitions in Employment Litigation" was devoted entirely to instruction in the latest techniques in bill padding for employment lawyers. [Full Article]