Wise Mechanical Contractors v. Bignell’s Empirical Analysis
1986
Citation profile
20 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 21 later decisions — most recently September 2022
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 Malvo Ex Rel. Malvo v. J. C. Penney Co. · 23 Ariz. App. 90 - Home Insurance Company v. Industrial Commission · Wien Air Alaska v. Arant · Thomas v. Bailey · Irving v. Bullock
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 21 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[i]f an attorney who represents claimants makes nothing on his unsuccessful cases and no more than a normal hourly fee in his successful cases, he is in a poor business. He would be better off moving to the defense side of the compensation hearing room where attorneys receive an hourly fee, win or lose, or pursuing any of the other various law practice areas where a steady hourly fee is available. As we have noted, the objective of awarding attorney’s fees in compensation cases is to ensure that competent counsel are available to represent injured workers. This objective would not be furthered by a system in which claimants’ counsel could receive nothing more than an hourly fee when they win while receiving nothing at all when they lose.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage“In workers’ compensation cases the objective is to make attorney fee awards both fully compensatory and reasonable so that competent counsel will be available to furnish legal services to injured workers. Wien Air Alaska v. Arant, 592 P.2d 352, 365-66 (Alaska 1979). By contrast, the purpose of Civil Rule 82 is to afford reasonable partial compensation for attorney’s fees to the winning civil litigant.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“An example illustrates the point. If an attorney wins three out of every five cases and is limited to the ordinary hourly rate, say $100, on his victorious cases, and receives no fee in the cases which are lost, his overall hourly compensation is $60 rather than $100, assuming the same amount of time is spent in each case.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. Cooper v. Thompson
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.