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
Rule 1.5 of the North Carolina Rules of Professional Conduct sets the baseline: a lawyer's fee must not be "clearly excessive," measured against factors including the customary fee charged locally for similar work, the attorney's experience and ability, the difficulty of the specific problems the case presented, and whether the fee is fixed or contingent.
A genuinely distinctive small-claims mechanism
N.C. Gen. Stat. § 6-21.1 gives a trial judge discretion to award a separate attorney fee — paid by the losing defendant and taxed as part of the court costs — in a personal injury or property damage case where the judgment is $10,000 or less. This mechanism exists alongside, not instead of, the ordinary contingency fee arrangement.
It's discretionary, not automatic
Worth noting: the statute gives the judge discretion to award this fee. It doesn't happen automatically in every case under the $10,000 threshold — the court examines the time the attorney spent on the case and the reasonableness of the amount before awarding it.
No specific percentage written into law
Beyond the "not clearly excessive" requirement, North Carolina sets no specific percentage ceiling for a personal injury contingency fee. The rate is negotiated privately between attorney and client, with one-third of the recovery being a commonly used figure in practice.