A common criticism of arbitration is that its upfront costs (arbitrators' fees and administrative costs) may preclude consumers and employees from asserting their claims. This paper argues that this criticism has it exactly backwards. Rather than arbitration costs interfering with the workings of contingent fee contracts, the contingent fee mechanism provides a means for overcoming liquidity and risk aversion barriers to arbitration. Arbitration costs are just another form of litigation expense, which attorneys should be willing to advance on behalf of clients with viable claims. In the vast majority of federal court cases adjudicating cost-based challenges to arbitration agreements, the claimant is represented by counsel and, in most, has asserted a claim that, if successful, would per...
Lawyers are sharks. One California attorney should have known that basic fact before getting nudged from a personal injury case by a more experienced attorney brought in for trial. Chris Olsen had a nice little personal injury case show up at his law office door. Kathleen Klawitter had been injured at a golf course in 1998. Klawitter hired Olsen for the case, placing the lawyer in line to receive a fat contingent fee.
An attorney who worked on a personal injury case for four years should not have been ordered to turn the $119,600 contingent fee over to her former law firm, the Missouri Court of Appeals has held. In a case of first impression, the Southern District emphasized that the underlying personal injury case, which was pending at the time the attorney left her firm, was the property of the client.
A law firm could be required to refund a portion of a contingent fee that was deemed "unreasonable" based on events that occurred after the client executed her retainer agreement, the Colorado Court of Appeal has ruled in affirming judgment. The plaintiff received a judgment of $500,000 plus interest from an automobile accident lawsuit. The plaintiff recorded a lien against the real property of the judgment debtor and hired the law firm to collect the award under a 30 percent contingent fee agreement.
Only in America could enterprising lawyers turn a 218-year old, 32-word statute meant to redress piracy into a weapon of mass tort litigation. This law is the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), a tiny part of the larger 1789 Judiciary Act. Contingent-fee attorneys have commandeered this law and are using it to file massive lawsuits in U.S. courts on behalf of foreign plaintiffs against foreign defendants for alleged harm that occurred far outside our borders. The suits not only needlessly clog our courts, but they also raise the fundamental question of who should make U.S. foreign- policy decisions: unelected judges and lawyers, or the legislative and executive branches? U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Henry Friendly in 1975 called the ATS a "legal Lohengrin .. no one seems to know whence it came." ...
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