Two people can sign a fee agreement with the same percentage printed on it and walk away with different amounts of money from an identical settlement. The percentage is not where the difference lives. The difference lives in the noun that comes after it: a third of what. Gross recovery, net recovery, recovery after costs, recovery after costs and liens. Those are four different numbers, and in a serious injury case the spread between them is not rounding.
This matters most in the cases where the total is large and the expenses are large with it. A commercial truck case is the clearest example. The investigation costs real money: downloading the engine control module, hiring a reconstruction engineer, pulling driver logs and maintenance records, sometimes a deposition tour across two states. Those bills land somewhere. Where they land, relative to the fee calculation, is a term you negotiate before you sign, not a detail you discover at the end.
Gross recovery and net recovery are not close to the same thing
A contingency fee means the attorney is paid a share of what is recovered and nothing if nothing is recovered. Case costs are a separate category from the fee: filing fees, expert witnesses, records requests, court reporters, exhibits. Most firms advance those costs and get repaid out of the settlement.
The question is the order of operations. If the fee is calculated on the gross, the percentage applies to the full settlement and costs are then subtracted from the client's remainder. If the fee is calculated on the net, costs come out first and the percentage applies to what is left.
| Illustration | Fee on gross | Fee on net |
|---|---|---|
| Settlement | $200,000 | $200,000 |
| Case costs | $30,000 | $30,000 |
| Fee at one third | $66,667 | $56,667 |
| To the client | $103,333 | $113,333 |
Those figures are arithmetic, not market data. But the shape is the point: same percentage, same settlement, a five figure difference driven entirely by one sentence. And the gap widens with the cost load. A case that needed a biomechanical expert and an accident reconstruction has a bigger cost bucket than a case that settled on the police report and a stack of medical bills, so the same clause costs more in the expensive case.
The rules of professional conduct in your state already speak to this
Nearly every state bar has adopted a version of the model rule requiring a contingency agreement to be in writing, to state the percentage, and to state specifically whether expenses are deducted before or after the fee is calculated. That requirement exists because the ambiguity was a recurring source of fee disputes. So the answer should already be in the document in front of you. If you cannot find the sentence, that is the sentence to ask about.
Beyond that baseline, states diverge, and the divergence is real money. Some states impose a sliding scale by court rule, where the percentage steps down as the recovery grows, so a large verdict is not billed at the same rate as a small one. Some states cap contingency fees in specific case types, medical malpractice being the usual one. Many states require a judge to approve the fee and the settlement outright when the injured person is a minor or is incapacitated, which means the agreement you signed is a proposal until a court signs off. A few states require particular disclosure language, or a signed acknowledgment, or a cooling off period.
Then there is the tier that has nothing to do with the state at all. Most agreements raise the percentage once a lawsuit is filed, and raise it again if the case is set for trial or goes up on appeal. What triggers the step is written into the contract, and the triggers are not uniform. Filing a petition is a different event from serving the defendant, which is a different event from a trial setting. In a rural venue with a crowded docket, a case can sit in the filed tier for a long stretch without anyone stepping into a courtroom.
Local rule and local venue change the arithmetic before anyone argues merits
Where the wreck happened decides more than which courthouse gets the file. It decides the comparative fault rule, which governs whether a partially at-fault plaintiff recovers anything and how much gets shaved off. It decides how long you have to file. It decides whether there is a cap on certain categories of damages. Each of those sets the ceiling on the gross number, and the fee is a share of that number.
Trucking adds a federal layer on top. Interstate motor carriers operate under safety regulations administered by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which covers driver qualification, hours of service, inspection and maintenance records. Those records are the evidence, and there are retention windows on them. A preservation letter that goes out in week one is worth more than an expert hired in month eight. When you talk to a truck wreck attorney, ask what gets sent in the first week and who pays for it, because those early steps are case costs and they land in the same bucket you just negotiated over.
The household and the fleet are having two different conversations
A family hit by a tractor trailer has one case, one time. The fee agreement is a single document, negotiated once, under pressure, often while somebody is still in the hospital. Every clause in it applies to the entire outcome. There is no portfolio to average across and no second case to fix the terms on.
The carrier on the other side is not in that position. Its legal spend is a line item across hundreds of claims a year, usually billed hourly under a panel agreement with rates negotiated in advance, with billing guidelines specifying what gets approved and what gets written off. It has a claims department that has seen this exact fact pattern before and knows roughly what it costs to resolve. It is managing an average. The household is managing an outcome.
That asymmetry is an argument for reading the fee agreement the way a company would read a vendor contract. Ask for the gross or net sentence to be pointed out to you. Ask which expenses count as case costs and which are firm overhead, since postage, copying and staff time get treated differently from firm to firm. Ask what happens to advanced costs if the case is lost. Ask how medical liens and health insurance subrogation get handled, because a lienholder with a statutory right to repayment can take a large share of the client's remainder after the fee is already set. Ask whether the percentage steps up, and on what exact event.
All of those are ordinary questions with ordinary answers, and a firm that quotes on net rather than gross will usually tell you so plainly, because it is a better deal for the client and they know it.
The number to compare across two firms is not the percentage. It is the estimated dollars in your hand at the end, built from the same assumed settlement, the same assumed cost load, and each firm's own clause. Ask both to walk you through that calculation on paper. The one that does it without hesitating has already told you something useful about how the rest of the case will be run.