Contingent Fees: Beyond the intuitive threat

Whereas contingent fee financing of litigation is a crucial aspect of the United States’ system of litigation, Belgian law explicitly forbids this practice. The authors aim to deepen the knowledge of the contingent fee system in European scholarship, by providing an adequate definition, a short oversight of its history and an overview of how the system works in practice in the United States. Thereafter, the authors aim to determine whether the contingent fee system is really incompatible with the general principles that underlie Belgian law, among others the principle of professional independence of the lawyer, that allegedly justify the ban on contingent fees in Belgium. Given the acceptance of success fees and the fact that other types of lawyer remuneration can challenge a lawyer’s professional independence and trigger overreaching with regard to remuneration as well, the authors plead for the implementation of the contingent fee in Belgium’s system of adjudication, not as a substitute for free legal services, but as an additional measure to guarantee access to the courts to all citizens, which should be an imperative of every modern welfare state.status: publishe