US-style contingent fees and UK-style conditional fees: agency problems and the supply of legal services

Winand Emons () and Nuno Garoupa ()

Managerial and Decision Economics, 2006, vol. 27, issue 5, pages 379-385

Abstract: Under contingent fees, the attorney gets a share of the judgment; 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 incentives than conditional fees independently of whether upfront payments are restricted to be non-negative or not. Under contingent fees, the attorney uses her information about what is at stake more efficiently. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Date: 2006
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1002/mde.1269 Link to full text; subscription required (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:mgtdec:v:27:y:2006:i:5:p:379-385

Access Statistics for this article

Managerial and Decision Economics is edited by Paul H. Rubin

More articles in Managerial and Decision Economics from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().