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.
The real malpractice schedule, written into statute
For a medical malpractice claim, Wis. Stat. § 655.013(1m) sets the fee at 33⅓% of the first $1,000,000 recovered and 20% of anything above that — or 25% of the first $1,000,000 if liability is stipulated within 180 days of filing and no later than 60 days before trial. This is a genuine numeric cap, not a general reasonableness standard, and it applies only to malpractice claims under Chapter 655.
A real case about fees with no real work behind them
Outside the statutory malpractice schedule, Wisconsin courts still police excessive fees under their inherent authority. In one reported case, an attorney who had only monitored a class action — without contributing legal expertise, time, or funds to actually prosecuting it — sought a one-third contingency fee on top of the 15% that the attorneys who did the actual work had already taken. The Wisconsin Court of Appeals refused to enforce the fee, noting it worked out to roughly $5,700 an hour, and that courts have "inherent power to determine the reasonableness of attorney fees and to refuse to enforce any contract that calls for clearly excessive or unreasonable fees."
What this shows about Wisconsin's two-track system
Together, these two features illustrate Wisconsin's structure clearly: a hard numeric ceiling for malpractice claims specifically, and an active, enforced reasonableness standard everywhere else — not merely a theoretical one.
Negotiable, within its own track
For ordinary personal injury claims, the fee percentage remains negotiable between attorney and client, subject to reasonableness. For malpractice claims, the rate is effectively fixed by the statutory schedule, unless a court approves a departure for exceptional circumstances.