70 N.C. App. 147 - Thompson v. Thompson’s Empirical Analysis
1984
Citation profile
20 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 20 later decisions — most recently July 2014
20 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Relies on Baskerville v. Baskerville · Osborne v. Osborne · 38 N.C. App. 61 - Covington v. Rhodes · Covington v. Rhodes · Archbell v. Archbell
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 20 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Wives contemplating divorce are often distraught and without experience in negotiating contracts. Should contingent fee contracts between them and the attorneys they employ under such conditions become the usual fee arrangement, charges of overreaching and undue influence will be all too frequent. The public, the legal profession, and the bench would all suffer. We believe all -will benefit by maintaining the present public policy of not enforcing such contracts no matter how freely and fairly entered into and how reasonable may be the fee thereby produced. The wise discretion of capable and experienced trial judges (aided by the evidence placed before them by the parties prior to the time the court fixes the fee to be paid by the husband) can be relied upon to assure every attorney an adequate fee and thus assure every wife adequate representation.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“The question of the validity of a contingent fee contract in a domestic case is one of first impression in this jurisdiction. However, the longstanding and prevailing view in other jurisdictions is that a fee contract contingent on the securing of a divorce, or contingent in amount on the amount of alimony, support, or property settlement to be obtained, is against public policy and void.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.