Fixed fees in litigation are rare, yet frequently preferred!

The findings report from Fulbright & Jaworski’s Fourth Annual Litigation Trends Survey at 20 states that “Half of all respondents in the survey [303 companies] have used fixed fees, but of those, most use them rarely.”

Note that it is possible that the question was something like “Have you ever used fixed fee arrangements in litigation?” so the look-back was not “in the past 12 months” or otherwise limited. But note also that around a quarter of the companies in the survey had revenues of less than $100 million, and thus had relatively few or small lawsuits.

Ironically, when the respondents ranked their “Preferred Alternative Fee/Billing Arrangement,” fixed fees was by far the most frequently preferred, at 42 percent, followed by volume discounts at 26 percent, hourly (14%), contingency fees (11%) and success-based billing (7%).

Interesting, too, that “The majority of survey respondents (59%) said they had never paid a premium fee.”