Arbitration Costs and Contingent Fee Contracts

No cure, be paid: super-contingent fee contracts

It is well-known that in a number of employment situations one uses nocure-no-pay contracts, usually denoted as contingent fee contracts (CFcontracts). A typical example is the fee system for attorneys in countries like the US. Under a CF-contract the plaintiff pays a positive fee to his attorney if the case is won and nothing if it is lost, see Hay (1996, 1997). These situations can be modelle...

Rationalizing Costs in Investment Treaty Arbitration

Who Benefits from the Uniformity of Contingent Fee Rates?

Lawyers’ contingent fee (CF) rates are rather uniform, often one-third of the recovery. Arguably, this uniformity is a type of anti-competitive pricefixing, which results in clients paying supra-competitive fees. This paper challenges this argument. It shows that uniform CF rates provide clients with an important advantage, as such rates enable them to make a de facto “take-it-orleave-it” offer...

Ending unfair arbitration: fighting against the enforcement of arbitration agreements in long-term care contracts.

Although provisions requiring nursing facility residents to agree to mandatory pre-dispute arbitration are now ubiquitous, many courts have refused to enforce these provisions and have adopted a variety of legal arguments to do so. Arbitration can be expensive and biased in favor of the nursing facility. It limits access to courts, discovery, available remedies and precedential value of decisio...

The Rise of Contingent Fee Representation in Patent Litigation

It is well known that plaintiff-side contingent representation is on the rise in patent litigation. But why? And what are the lawyers in the field like? Although scholars have studied contingent litigation in other contexts — such as medical malpractice, personal injury, and products liability litigation — patent litigation has received almost no attention. This gap in the literature is unsettl...