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The Market For Contingent Fee-Financed Tort Litigation: Is It Price Competitive?, Lester Brickman

Articles

Tort liability has undergone an enormous expansion in the past 40 years. So too has the effective hourly rate obtained by plaintiff lawyers which has increased well over 1000% in that time frame (adjusted for inflation). That the enormous increases in effective hourly rates parallel the enormous expansion in tort liability raises a number of issues. In this article, I examine one of them: whether the market for contingent fee-financing of tort litigation is price competitive. To do so, I examine certain indicia of a noncompetitive market including the fact of uniform pricing, the absence of economic justification for uniform …