Lawyer Barons
What Their Contingency Fees Really Cost America

This book is an inquiry into how contingency fees distort our civil justice system, influence our political system and endanger democratic governance.

Lester Brickman (Author)

9781107001220, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 31 January 2011

574 pages, 1 table
23.5 x 15.8 x 3 cm, 0.9 kg

'Around … interesting and sometimes telling tales of poor conduct, Brickman pieces together a wealth of critical claims about the tort system. The Cambridge Law Journal

This book is a broad and deep inquiry into how contingency fees distort our civil justice system, influence our political system and endanger democratic governance. Contingency fees are the way personal injury lawyers finance access to the courts for those wrongfully injured. Although the public senses that lawyers manipulate the justice system to serve their own ends, few are aware of the high costs that come with contingency fees. This book sets out to change that, providing a window into the seamy underworld of contingency fees that the bar and the courts not only tolerate but even protect and nurture. Contrary to a broad academic consensus, the book argues that the financial incentives for lawyers to litigate are so inordinately high that they perversely impact our civil justice system and impose other unconscionable costs. It thus presents the intellectual architecture that underpins all tort reform efforts.

1. The origin of the contingency fee
2. How profitable are contingency fees?
3. Are contingency fee profits 'reasonable'?
4. How tort lawyers have increased their profits by restraining competition
5. Why the market has failed to correct the absence of price competition
6. Impediments imposed by the bar to price competition
7. The effects of incentives created by contingency fees
8. How the quest for profits influenced the development of the tort system
9. Lawyers' role in the expansion of tort liability
10. The role of the judiciary in tort system expansion
11. Current and future expansions of tort liability
12. The litigation explosion: 'fact or fiction'?
13. Measures of the rate of expansion of tort liability
14. The relationship between injury rates and tort system costs
15. The impacts of substantial increases in tort lawyers' effective hourly rates
16. Class actions
17. Fees in class actions
18. How class action lawyers game fee setting
19. Securities class actions
20. Regulation through litigation
21. A new role for punitive damages: policy-making as a profit center
22. For-profit partnerships between state attorneys general and contingency fee lawyers
Appendix A. A critique of Alex Tabarrok, the problem of contingent fees for waiters
Appendix B. Calculating tort lawyers' effective hourly rates in 1960
Appendix C. Electronic discovery and the use of contract lawyers
Appendix D. The HMO litigation
Appendix E. The GM 'side saddle' truck litigation: the (short lived) triumph of litigation over the regulatory process
Appendix F. Modern class actions undermine democratic precepts
Appendix G. Other ways lawyers game class action fees
Appendix H. Non-recourse financing of tort litigation
Appendix I. Political contributions by tort lawyers and the U.S. chamber of commerce
Appendix J. Special rules favoring lawyers
Appendix K. The ultimate medical expense 'build-up': whiplash
Appendix L. The effect of punitive damages on compensatory awards.

Subject Areas: Torts / Delicts [LNV], Legal history [LAZ], Jurisprudence & general issues [LA], Law [L]