An attorney who clearly doesn't understand how a contingency fee works
I wasn't surprised that an attorney who writes for "The Conservative Voice" would praise Bush's recent Executive Order that bars Federal agencies from using contingency fee contracts. I was surprised that such an attorney would have no idea how contingency fees work.
The media, relatively speaking, has all but ignored the EO, the excised text of which follows. How few people, otherwise reasonably informed, knew that the Federal Government sometimes retained attorneys to litigate upon a contingency-fee basis! Many States, of course, do likewise. The fees so earned by and large are minimal compared to the millions and multi-millions of dollars collected by the more high-flying “trial lawyers.” However, they are fees paid by taxpayers.
Source: “Hail to the Chief,” for Saving Taxpayers from Payment of Contingency Fees by Marion Edwyn Harrison
Under a contingency fee agreement, the attorneys are only compensated if they obtain a monetary recovery. Their fee comes from that recovery, not the pocket of the taxpayers. Because a contingency fee agreement is the epitome of "pay for performance," they tend to motivate attorneys to zealously and aggressively work to obtain a recovery for their client. In fact, that's the reason this EO was signed - because government attorneys and their contracted attorneys are supposed to remain impartial, and not be zealous or aggressive.
For better or worse, taxpayers will now be forced to pay high hourly rates to outside counsel, and pay them regardless of how effective the attorney is. Now, rather than having an incentive to quickly recover a lot of money for the taxpayers, outside counsel will have an incentive to make cases unnecessarily complicated and to prolong them as much as possible to accrue as many billable hours as possible, all at the taxpayer's expense.
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