"Success Fee": Old Song, New Tune

Abstract

The research featured substantive and procedural peculiarities of contract costing for legal assistance through the so-called "success fee", or contingency fee, from the point of view of various legal approaches. The contract costing for legal services based on contingency fee does not comply with the current Russian law. Therefore, it can be difficult for the lawyer to collect the fee from the customer. Though courts do acknowledge contingency fees, the related business practice remains legally unregulated. The situation did not change in 2013 when the institution of invalidity of legal transactions was reformed in civil law. The issue belongs to the substantive sphere, since the procedural area reveals no peculiarities in reimbursing expenses incurred to pay for the services of a legal representative. The recent innovations of legal regulation on "success fee" are related to the new edition of the Federal Law "On Advocacy and the Legal Profession in the Russian Federation", which entered into force on March 01, 2020. The authors believe that the problem is not the matter of advocacy legislation because it would then contradict with the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, which has priority over other regulations in this case. They criticize the obvious lobbying of legally enforceable precautions to include stipulated remuneration on legal assistance, as well as the substantial restrictions on the rights of private lawyers with no attorneyship.