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Pretty simple. Contingency is risk/reward. You can invest 200 hours on a matter and lose. 0% investment return on your time. Whereas the $500 an hour attorney makes $100,000 on that 200 every single time.
Boils down to personality type.
Rising Star
The real problem with contingency fee models is the lack of consistent income to cover overhead and operating expenses; cases can take years to get to trial and nearly as long to settle for any significant value. Not to mention it can be very expensive to bring a case to trial, even if it’s some bullshit pi case you can easily incur $10k in filing fees, experts, costs, depositions, travel etc so you could be out $10k - lose maybe incur some monetary sanctions cause your a crappy plaintiffs attorney. Then your clients will sue you for malpractice.
So you likely have to grind out a bunch of bottom feeder insurance settlements to scrape by and cover your operating expenses, bus stop adds and radio jingles. All the while getting more and more disgusted at your very existence.
The only time I ever considered ditching business law for personal injury was after I saw him somehow squeeze like $350,000 out of a fender bender an unretained expert said has no chance to go anywhere. Small firm, so we also had virtually zero expense on that case against the low overhead. With his cut, that was a six figure payday for him for only a few months work it felt like. I didn’t always agree with him and felt he was a bit boomery but damn did he know how to get insurance to dance.
Granted we got lucky. Had it gone to trial it’d likely have been a sunk cost, but after seeing that I started questioning my options on how to pay off my student loans faster.
Pro
Most first years out of law school won’t bring in $600k of business in order to get a contingency fee...so getting that $190k + bonus is a safer option.
Rising Star
When a case settles for $2k after you’ve put in 20 hours of work, you’ve made $40 an hour.
Contingency means litigation, and some people are just not made for litigation. I’d rather work for minimum wage doing transactional work from home than ever step foot in a courthouse.
We settled a case for 125k on a mixed fee (we got 30% plus 15k flat fee and client paid all expenses in real time win or lose). I liked the arrangement, as everyone had skin in the game. But if we had billed hourly, we would have been paid over 250k. I don't even want to know what our hourly rate was when we worked every weekend on that case for over a month. In the end, we made money and it was a fun case with a great client but definitely didn't come close to getting our hours back.
Pro
Because there are not a lot of good cases. Many are taken purely to bluff to get a modest settlement and sometimes the hours to fee ratio is nonsense. Only the big high value cases are gonna make it worth it and they don’t come every day