bdevy.

Professional services

Law Practice Contingency Fee Calculator

How a contingency recovery divides, and what the matter earned the practice per hour.

Your numbers

$
%
$
$

Result

Profit to the practice $26,828
Fee $31,664
Client receives $56,137
Effective hourly on the fee $405.94
Overhead absorbed $4,836
The fee is $31,664 on 78 hours, an effective $405.94 an hour. After $4,836 of overhead the practice keeps $26,828, and the client receives $56,137.

Business arithmetic for running a practice, not legal advice. Fee agreements, contingency limits, trust accounting and advertising are all governed by the rules of professional conduct where you practise, and several are strict. Check the applicable rules before any of this affects a client agreement or a marketing decision. Contingency percentages are capped by statute or court rule in many jurisdictions and for many matter types, often on a sliding scale, and some categories require court approval of the fee. The agreement must state whether costs come off before or after the fee, because the difference is material. This does not value a claim and cannot.

Get a Free Business Audit

Questions

About this calculator

What effective hourly rate should contingency work produce?

Higher than your hourly rate, because you carry the risk of recovering nothing. Work that returns less per hour than billing hourly is transferring risk to you for no premium.

Does the order of deduction matter to the client?

Yes, substantially, and it is where most fee disputes start. It must be explicit in the agreement and explained rather than assumed.

The formula

fee on gross or net depending on the agreement; practice profit = fee less overhead absorbed by the hours

Put this calculator on your site

Free to embed. Paste this where you want it to appear. It stays up to date automatically because it loads from BDEVY.

Please keep the attribution line. It is the only thing we ask in return.

Estimating is the easy part

The jobs you never hear about cost more than the ones you mis-measure. BDEVY builds the marketing, systems and automation that bring them in.