A dollar threshold instead of a percentage ceiling
Illinois caps medical malpractice attorney fees at a flat 33⅓%, written directly into statute — a percentage ceiling that applies the same way regardless of case size. New Hampshire takes a different approach entirely under RSA 508:4-e: rather than fixing a percentage, it requires court approval of the fees and costs once a settlement or judgment reaches $200,000 — in any personal injury case, not just malpractice.
Why this is a genuinely different kind of check
A percentage cap constrains the rate itself before negotiation even starts. New Hampshire's rule instead leaves the percentage to ordinary reasonableness review under Rule 1.5, but adds a mandatory court sign-off once the recovery gets large enough to matter most — a size-triggered check rather than a rate-triggered one.
A real percentage cap that didn't survive
New Hampshire did once have an actual percentage-based fee limit for medical malpractice contingency fees, written into RSA chapter 507-C. But that entire chapter — fee limits included — was declared unconstitutional and non-severable in Carson v. Maurer (1980), the same ruling that struck the chapter's $250,000 damages cap. The fee-limit text technically remains in the state code, but it has carried no legal force for decades.
Consistent with New Hampshire's broader pattern
This fits a larger pattern in New Hampshire tort law: a genuine, sustained judicial resistance to rigid statutory ceilings, whether on damages or on fees. Three separate damages caps fell to constitutional challenges between 1980 and 1999, and the one fee-limit statute that might have survived alongside them went down with the first of those rulings.