More on Reverse Contingent Fees
In this post from last summer, I mentioned reverse contingent fees as a potential means of compensating appellate counsel. Spurred by a question I asked in response to one of his recent posts, Blawgletter (a/k/a Susman Godfrey's Barry Barnett) expounded on how his firm approaches reverse contingent fees in business litigation matters. The methodology would depend on the case, its procedural posture, and the client's financial well being/creditworthiness, but the basic idea is to assign a dollar value to the client's exposure and base the fee on the "savings" obtained by the result. With reports of $1,000 hourly rates and in-house counsel under increasing pressure to rein in outside lawyer fees, we may see more of this approach in the future, especially from solos and small firms who have the flexibility to implement it.
