Attorneys fees

Attorney's fee is a chiefly United States term for compensation for legal services performed by an attorney (lawyer or law firm) for a client, in or out of court. It may be an hourly, flat-rate or contingent fee. Recent studies suggest that when lawyers charge a flat-fee rather than billing by the hour, they work less hard on behalf of clients and client get worse outcomes. Attorney fees are separate from fines, compensatory and punitive damages, and (except in Nevada) from court costs in a legal case. Under the "American rule", attorney fees are usually not paid by the losing party to the winning party in a case, except pursuant to specific statutory or contractual rights.

The phrase is a legal term of art in American jurisprudence (in which lawyers are collectively referred to as "attorneys", a wording practice not found in most other legal systems). Attorney's fees (or attorneys' fees, depending upon number of attorneys involved, or simplified to attorney fees) are the fees, including labor charges and costs, charged by lawyers or their firms for legal services provided by them to their clients. They do not include incidental, non-legal costs (e.g., expedited shipping costs for legal documents). Generally (Nevada being an exception), attorney fees are tabulated separately from court costs, and are also separate from fines, compensatory and punitive damages, and other monies in a legal case not enumerated as court costs.

The analogous concept has differing names and applicability in common law systems such as in most of the Commonwealth of Nations, and in civil law systems such as those of most of Europe and many former European colonies. 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. The losing party in a case in most common law systems pays for the costs (including fees) of both parties.

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