[1][2][3] Attorney fees are separate from fines, compensatory and punitive damages, and (except in Nevada) from court costs in a legal case.
For example, in a court case under English law, the fees of solicitors and barristers (two types of lawyer) are combined with court costs and various other expenses into a combined "costs", while non-court solicitor expenses may be separately billed as per-hour charges, and those of barristers as daily brief fees.
Most jurisdictions in the United States prohibit working for a contingent fee in family law or criminal cases.
Regional urban centers such as Salt Lake City will average $150 per hour for an associate's time on a basic case, but that fee will increase for larger firms.
Within large firms in the United States, billable hours are considered a measure of productivity with a minimum of about 1,800 required or expected of associates.
[10][11][12][13][14] Solo practitioners typically earn less than lawyers in corporate law firms but more than those working for state or local government.
[18] Perhaps the most widely followed set of rates are what is called the Laffey Matrix available from the United States Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia.
The first American attorney to regularly charge a four-digit hourly fee ($1,000 and higher) was Benjamin Civiletti in late 2005.
[23] In a landmark 1985 decision, Walters v. National Association of Radiation Survivors, the U.S. Supreme Court held that statutory restrictions on attorney's fees are subject only to highly deferential rational basis review, when challenged as limitations upon the First Amendment right to freedom of speech and the Fifth Amendment right to due process.
[24] The Court then held that Congress had a rational basis for restricting attorney's fees in veterans' benefits cases to $10.
[24] In 2006, the statute at issue in Walters was heavily revised so as to remove the $10 attorney's fee restriction for most veterans' benefits cases.
[25][26] Long before the Walters case, conservatives in the United States had begun to put forward tort reform proposals to restrict attorney fees, which gained traction in the 1970s.
[27][clarification needed] Although some people have objected to these laws as an unfair restriction on freedom of contract, Justice William Rehnquist shot down that argument in his majority opinion for the Walters court.
[24] Rehnquist implied that there was no principled way for the Court to overturn such laws as a violation of freedom of contract without returning to the now-discredited paternalism of the Lochner era, in which the Court had routinely invoked freedom of contract as an excuse to overturn laws regulating minimum wages and child labor.
But generally, state court judges have no common law authority to award such fees against the losing party.
So if, for example, a person brings a civil rights action in state court and wins, he may be entitled to an award of attorney fees.
A majority of states allow generally for an award to any party in a lawsuit, if another party has forced him to expend money on attorneys fees to defend against a claim utterly or substantially lacking any possible merit and brought in bad faith (frequently called "abusive litigation" or a "frivolous lawsuit").
For example, in Georgia, a trial court must award attorneys fees if a party has brought a claim "with respect to which there existed such a complete absence of any justiciable issue of law or fact that it could not be reasonably believed that a court would accept the asserted claim, defense, or other position".
In 2013, a federal court awarded class counsel attorneys' fees totaling over $90 million for a $1.25 billion settlement in In Re Black Farmers Discrimination Litigation.