How Does LeanLaw Calculate and Let Me Adjust a Contingency Fee Percentage?

A contingency fee percentage comes from the engagement agreement, not from LeanLaw. Settlement Wizard, part of SettleFlow under LeanLaw’s Contingency plan, applies that percentage against settlement funds to calculate attorney fees, liens, and net-to-client, and recalculates automatically whenever the percentage itself changes.

Where the percentage itself comes from

What a firm can charge on contingency, and whether a given fee needs court or carrier approval, is governed by your jurisdiction’s bar rules and the type of matter — a workers’-compensation case and a straightforward personal-injury case don’t necessarily play by the same rule. That’s a question for your jurisdiction and your fee agreement, never for software, and no calculation tool changes what’s permissible; it only applies the number the agreement and, where required, the approving body has already settled on.

What Settlement Wizard actually does with that number

Once a percentage exists for a matter, Settlement Wizard applies it against the settlement or recovery amount, nets out case costs and liens, and produces the lines that make up the settlement statement — attorney fee, cost reimbursement, lien payoffs, and what’s left as the client’s net. Say a hypothetical case settles for $100,000 with a one-third fee: that’s $33,333 in attorney fees before liens and case costs come out. Drop the percentage to a quarter because a workers’-comp carrier’s approval requires it, and the same calculation reruns at $25,000 instead. The mechanism doesn’t change; only the number feeding it does.

Why the percentage isn’t fixed once you set it

Contingency fees get renegotiated more often than a one-time setup step would suggest — a carrier requires a reduction, a client pushes back and the firm agrees to come down, a fee-sharing arrangement changes mid-case. None of that is an edge case for a contingent practice; it’s closer to routine. Treating the percentage as something that can change, and having the settlement disbursement recalculate cleanly when it does, matters more than getting the number right once at intake.

What this depends on

• What your jurisdiction’s bar rules allow or require for the type of matter — a fixed rate, a sliding scale, or a required court or carrier approval.
• Whether liens attach to the recovery, and whether they’re paid before or as part of calculating the fee.
• Whether the client agreement permits renegotiating the fee after it’s signed, and under what circumstances.
• How your firm records the fee once it’s actually collected, since that ties back into cash velocity for a contingent practice specifically.

The number to have before the call

Whatever your firm calls it internally — attorney fee percentage, contingency rate, the split — the number that matters is the one in the signed agreement for this specific matter, not a system default. Everything downstream, the settlement statement, the lien payoff, the net check, runs off that number, which is exactly why it’s worth confirming before the disbursement, not after.

Related questions

Do you have to go through all of that, or can you just write a check once the case settles? The calculation still has to happen either way, since a check can’t be right without knowing the fee, the liens, and the costs first; the difference is whether that arithmetic runs by hand from a spreadsheet and a folder of correspondence, or against numbers already tied to the matter.

What’s the point of doing all that when I sometimes have to cut my fee because the client is upset? A fee reduction isn’t an exception the process has to work around — it’s a new percentage, and the same calculation reruns against it, which is the point of keeping the percentage separate from the arithmetic that uses it.