Blanchard v. Bergeron
The Court ruled that a contingent-fee agreement between a civil rights plaintiff and his lawyer does not cap the attorney's fee a court can award the winning side under federal civil rights law.
The decision resolves a split among the appeals courts over how contingency agreements interact with court-ordered fee awards, and it means judges must calculate a reasonable fee based on hours worked and rates charged, not on what the client's private contract happened to promise.
“a contingent-fee contract does not impose an automatic ceiling on an award of attorney’s fees”
The Court's core holding that private fee contracts don't cap statutory fee awards.
How it got here: A federal trial court awarded fees below what counsel requested; the Fifth Circuit further cut the award to the contingency-fee amount, and the Supreme Court agreed to resolve a circuit split.
The Case in Depth
What happened
A man alleged a sheriff's deputy beat him at a lounge and sued for violating his civil rights, along with a state-law negligence claim. A jury awarded him $10,000 in damages. His lawyer had a contingent-fee contract entitling him to 40% of any damages award. The man's lawyer then sought a much larger attorney's fee award from the losing defendants under federal civil rights fee-shifting law.
The question before the Court
If a civil rights plaintiff's lawyer agreed to work for a percentage of any damages won, does that percentage cap the attorney's fee a court can award under federal law?
Why it matters
Civil rights lawyers who take cases on contingency can now recover a court-set fee that reflects the actual time and effort they put in, even if that amount is far more than a percentage of the damages won. This makes lawyers more willing to take on civil rights cases, including ones seeking injunctions rather than big money damages, because their pay isn't tied only to the size of any award.
What changes now
The case is sent back to the lower courts, which must recalculate the attorney's fee award using the standard reasonable-hours-times-reasonable-rate method rather than capping it at 40% of the damages. The Court also left open, for a future case, whether paralegal and law clerk time can be billed separately as part of that fee award.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide how many hours were reasonably spent on this litigation, what a reasonable hourly rate should be, or whether paralegal and law clerk time may be billed separately from attorney time — those questions were left for the lower courts on remand.
Concurrences and dissents
How the Justices voted
Majority (1). Justice White (author).
Separate writings (1). Justice Sc (author of a opinion).
Concurrence in part — Justice Scalia
Justice Scalia agreed with the outcome and most of the opinion but objected to the majority's detailed reliance on committee-report references to a court of appeals decision and three district court cases. He argued that treating scattered citations in congressional committee reports as authoritative statements of Congress's intent is unrealistic and gives undue power to staff-drafted footnotes, and he declined to join that portion of the analysis.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court examined the fee-shifting statute's text, which allows 'a reasonable attorney's fee' but does not define reasonableness, and asked whether Congress meant a private fee contract to cap that amount.
- The Court reviewed the case law Congress's committee reports pointed to for guidance on reasonableness, including a widely cited twelve-factor checklist for evaluating fee awards, and found those sources treated a client's fee arrangement as only one relevant factor, not a hard limit.
- The Court applied the lodestar method — multiplying a reasonable number of hours worked by a reasonable hourly rate — as the proper starting point for calculating fee awards, consistent with its prior fee-shifting decisions.
- The Court reasoned that treating a contingency contract as an automatic ceiling would undercut the statute's purpose of ensuring civil rights plaintiffs can obtain effective legal representation, including for non-monetary relief like injunctions.
- The Court concluded that a reasonable fee, calculated the usual way, is owed regardless of what a private fee contract promised, so the fixed 40% cap applied below was legally wrong.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Limits Johnson v. Georgia Highway Express, Inc. (488 F. 2d 714)
Rejects Johnson's statement that a fee award can never exceed what a client contracted to pay.
Reaffirms Hensley v. Eckerhart (461 U. S. 424)
Relies on Hensley's lodestar method as the proper way to calculate attorney's fee awards.
Reaffirms Blum v. Stenson (465 U. S. 886)
Confirms fees shouldn't depend on whether counsel is private or a nonprofit legal organization.