Medical Contingent Fees.

Contingent fees and litigation settlement

Policy makers and static economic models often argue that contingent fees cause lawyers to settle cases sooner than their clients would like, so as to avoid accumulating costs of bargaining. Yet, in a dynamic setting, a willingness to sink costs can be a strategic advantage when seeking to establish the credibility of threats. This paper shows that this can be the case for cost-bearing continge...

The Problem of Contingent Fees for Waiters

In a series of influential papers, Lester Brickman (2003a, 2003b, 2004) has argued that the income and effective hourly rate of tort lawyers using contingent fees has increased by 1400% since 1960 and that the market for contingent fee lawyers is uncompetitive as evidenced by lack of price advertising and uniform pricing across practitioners, cases and time. He also argues that contingent fee l...

The Economics of US-style Contingent Fees and UK-style Conditional Fees∗

Under contingent fees the attorney gets a share of the judgement; under conditional fees the lawyer gets an upscale premium if the case is won which is, however, unrelated to the adjudicated amount. We compare conditional and contingent fees in a principal-agent framework where the lawyer chooses unobservable effort after she has observed the amount at stake. Contingent fees provide better ince...

Demands of Medical Fees from Medical Men

Medical Fees in the Colonial Period *

A comparison of physicians' fees in the Colonial period with those of today should reveal much of interest and value. Numerous daybooks are available establishing the sums paid to the physician in the currency of the time, but obviously direct comparisons cannot be made because of the change in the purchasing value of the units. Consultation with historians, sociologists, and economists has ind...