The core promise: no recovery, no fee
A contingency fee means the attorney's fee is contingent — dependent — on actually winning or settling the case. If there's no recovery at all, the client generally owes no attorney fee, regardless of how much work went into the case.
What Rule 1.5 actually requires
Montana Rule of Professional Conduct 1.5 sets the baseline: a lawyer's fee must be reasonable, measured against factors including the time and labor required, the fee customarily charged for similar work, and whether the fee is fixed or contingent. A state bar ethics opinion has confirmed the rule applies the same reasonableness analysis whether a fee is structured as a flat, fixed, or contingent arrangement.
A real case on what happens if the client switches attorneys
In Campbell v. Bozeman Investors of Duluth (1998), a Montana personal injury client fired her contingency-fee attorneys more than a year into the case and hired someone else, who then settled it. The original attorneys sought payment. The Montana Supreme Court confirmed the client had the right to end the representation — that alone wasn't a breach of the fee agreement — but also held the original attorneys could still recover the reasonable value of the work they had substantially performed before being let go, calculated separately from the full contingency percentage.
A sliding-scale cap that didn't make it into law
A 1987 bill would have replaced Montana's open-ended reasonableness standard with a declining sliding scale — 40% of the first $25,000 recovered, dropping through several lower tiers as the recovery grew. The bill was tabled in committee and never became law.
No specific percentage written into law
Beyond the reasonableness requirement, Montana sets no specific percentage ceiling for a personal injury or medical malpractice contingency fee. The rate is negotiated privately between attorney and client, commonly ranging from 33.3% to 40% of the total recovery.