What Is a Contingency Fee? (Injury Lawyers)

Somewhere on almost every page of this site there is a sentence recommending that a reader talk to a licensed attorney. What those sentences skip past is the question that actually stops people from picking up the phone: what does that conversation cost. The answer, in nearly all injury work, is nothing up front, because injury lawyers are paid through a contingency fee. The lawyer is paid a percentage of what the claim recovers and is paid nothing if it recovers nothing. That arrangement is why a person with no savings and a broken wrist can hire the same quality of representation as an insurance company with a legal department.

This explainer takes the arrangement apart. It covers what the percentage is and why it exists, why many agreements raise it if the case has to file suit, and the distinction that decides more money than any other detail in the document: the difference between fees and case costs, and whether costs are subtracted before or after the percentage is applied. It also covers what happens in a loss, how medical liens interact with the fee, what changing firms mid-case triggers, and how to judge whether a percentage is fair for the work. It sits alongside our explainer on who pays medical bills after an accident, which covers the other big deduction from a settlement, and our steps for finding a personal injury lawyer. Every figure below is invented for arithmetic clarity, and none of this is legal advice.

What a contingency fee actually is

A contingency fee is a fee that exists only if something is recovered. The lawyer agrees to take the case without charging by the hour, funds the work in the meantime, and is paid an agreed share of any settlement or judgment at the end. If the claim produces nothing, the attorney fee is zero. Nothing about the arrangement is unusual in commercial life, where percentage-of-outcome pay is common, but it feels unusual to people used to paying professionals by the hour.

Three things follow from that structure, and they explain nearly every feature of a fee agreement. First, the lawyer carries the risk of the case failing, so the percentage has to be large enough that the wins fund the losses. Second, the lawyer’s interest and the client’s interest point in the same direction on the size of the recovery, since both are paid from the same pool. Third, the lawyer has an interest in efficiency that the client may not share, because effort not converted into recovery is unpaid effort.

Those incentives are neither sinister nor perfectly aligned, and treating them honestly is more useful than pretending they do not exist. The arrangement is a bargain with tradeoffs on both sides, and understanding the tradeoffs is what lets a client read a fee agreement as a document rather than as a formality to be signed.

Why the contingency fee exists at all

Think about the alternative for a moment. If injury representation were sold by the hour, the person who needs it most would be the person least able to buy it. Someone out of work with a fractured ankle and a stack of medical bills does not have a retainer sitting in an account, and would be asked to fund months of uncertain work against an insurer with effectively unlimited legal spending. The claims that produce the largest injustices are precisely the claims that most people could not afford to pursue.

The contingency fee is the market’s answer to that problem. It converts a cost the client cannot pay into a share of a result the client does not yet have. In practical terms it turns legal representation from a purchase into a partnership, and it removes the single largest barrier to entry in civil disputes: the requirement to fund a fight before you know whether it is worth fighting.

It also functions as a filter, and this is the part clients rarely consider. A firm paid only on success has a strong reason to decline claims it does not believe in. A free consultation that ends in a polite no is genuinely informative, because it is a professional putting their own money where their assessment is. That signal is worth something even to a person who ends up handling the claim themselves, a decision covered in our explainer on whether you need a lawyer for a car accident.

The percentage most people hear, and why it is not a rule

Ask around and you will hear one third. It is the figure repeated in conversation, in advertising, and in most general writing about injury claims, and it is commonly cited for a claim that resolves through negotiation without a lawsuit being filed. It is a convention, not a law, and it is worth being precise about that difference.

Percentages differ by firm, by the type of claim, by how much work the case obviously requires, and by state. Some states regulate what may be charged in particular categories of case, sometimes with a sliding structure tied to the size of the recovery, sometimes with limits specific to certain claim types. Some agreements set several tiers rather than one number. Some firms quote a single flat percentage regardless of stage. Nothing in that list is universal enough to state as fact here.

The practical instruction is narrow. Do not go into a consultation with a number in your head that you treat as the correct one, because that leads to arguing about a convention instead of reading the actual terms. Go in expecting to be told a percentage, expecting to be told exactly when it changes, and expecting both answers to be printed in the agreement. Whether the rate you are quoted is reasonable is a judgment about the specific case, and the later sections of this explainer describe how to make it.

The sliding scale: why the percentage rises if suit is filed

Most contingency agreements are not one percentage but a schedule. A common shape is a lower rate for a claim settled before a lawsuit is filed and a higher rate once suit is filed or once the case reaches some later milestone such as the eve of trial or an appeal. The step up is often cited near 40 percent, again as a convention rather than a rule.

People often read that escalation as a penalty or a trick, as though the firm is rewarded for dragging the case out. The economics point the other way. Pre-suit work is largely correspondence: gathering records, building a demand package, and negotiating with an adjuster. Filing suit begins a different job. There are pleadings, written discovery, document production, depositions of the client and of witnesses, motion practice, expert retention and expert reports, mediation, and preparation for trial. The hours involved can be several times the pre-suit workload, and the costs advanced grow accordingly.

A flat percentage across both stages would create a worse incentive, not a better one. If a firm were paid the same share for a case it litigated for two years as for a case it resolved in three months of letters, the rational move would be to accept whatever the adjuster offered rather than to file. Tiering the fee is what makes filing suit a decision about the case rather than a decision about the firm’s economics.

Costs versus fees: the distinction that changes your net

Here is the distinction that decides more money than any other line in the document, and the one that people consistently miss. The fee is the lawyer’s compensation. Case costs are the money spent to pursue the claim. They are two separate deductions from the same settlement, and a client who budgets for one and not the other is surprised at disbursement.

Costs are ordinary expenses with invoices behind them. Court filing fees. Charges from hospitals and clinics for copies of records, which are billed per page in many places and add up faster than anyone expects. Deposition court reporters and transcripts. Expert witness time, which is usually the single largest cost item in a litigated case and can be substantial for a treating physician’s opinion alone. Investigators, accident reconstruction, service of process, postage, and mediator fees. None of that is the lawyer’s income. It is money spent, usually advanced by the firm, and repaid out of the recovery.

That advance is itself a service worth naming. A firm fronting several thousand dollars of expenses on a case that may recover nothing is extending credit against an uncertain outcome, which is part of what the percentage is buying. It is also why some agreements address whether interest is charged on advanced costs, and why that clause deserves a look. What matters for your arithmetic is simple: a settlement is reduced by the fee and by the costs, and the two are calculated separately.

What counts as a case cost

Fee agreements vary in how specifically they list costs, and the vaguer ones are worth questioning. A reasonable agreement identifies the categories of expense that may be advanced and says who decides when a significant one is incurred.

The categories that show up most often are records and reports from every treating provider, filing and service fees required by the court, deposition transcripts, expert fees, mediation fees, and the cost of demonstrative material if the case reaches trial. Some agreements also list internal charges such as photocopying, mileage, or postage at a stated rate, and those internal items are the ones most worth reading closely, because they are billed by the firm to the client rather than paid to an outside vendor.

Two questions clarify the whole subject. Will I be told before a cost above some threshold is incurred, and what is that threshold. And will I receive an itemized statement of costs at the end, with backup available on request. Both answers should be yes, and both belong in writing. A firm that resists an itemization is telling you something, and it is not a detail unique to this area of law: an expense nobody has to justify is an expense that grows.

Gross or net: where the percentage is calculated

Now the part that changes the number in your account. Suppose a claim settles and there are costs to repay. Two orders of operations are possible, and the fee agreement chooses one.

In the first, the percentage is applied to the gross settlement, and costs are subtracted afterward from what is left. In the second, costs are subtracted from the gross first, and the percentage is applied to the remainder. The second produces a smaller fee, because the fee base is smaller. The difference between the two is exactly the fee rate multiplied by the costs, which is a genuinely simple relationship and a useful one to carry in your head.

Illustratively, with a one third fee and $6,000 of costs, the difference between the two methods is one third of $6,000, which is $2,000, regardless of the size of the settlement. With $18,000 of costs in a litigated case and a 40 percent rate, the difference is $7,200. As costs grow, the calculation basis stops being a technicality and becomes one of the larger numbers in the disbursement. Neither method is improper; both are used. What matters is knowing which one the agreement specifies and factoring it into any comparison between firms. You can run either version in the companion below or sketch the whole claim in the settlement estimator.

A worked example: one settlement, two calculations

Numbers make the point better than description, so here is one illustrative claim carried through both methods. Every figure is invented for arithmetic clarity and none of it predicts any real outcome.

A claim settles for $90,000 without a lawsuit being filed. The fee agreement sets one third for a pre-suit resolution. The firm has advanced $6,000 in case costs across medical records, a police report, an expert review of the imaging, and mediation. A health plan asserts a reimbursement claim that has been negotiated down to $12,000.

Under the gross-first method, the fee is one third of $90,000, which is $30,000. Subtract the $6,000 in costs and the $12,000 reimbursement, and $42,000 reaches the client. Under the costs-first method, the $6,000 comes off first, leaving $84,000 as the fee base. One third of $84,000 is $28,000. Subtract that fee, the $6,000 in costs, and the $12,000 reimbursement from the original $90,000, and $44,000 reaches the client. Same settlement, same costs, same lien, same percentage. A $2,000 difference in what the client keeps, produced entirely by a clause about the order of operations.

Two observations. The gap is not enormous here because the costs are modest, and that is the honest reading: on a small pre-suit claim this clause is worth a few hundred dollars. The gap scales with the costs, though, and in a litigated case with expert fees the same clause can be worth many thousands. It is a question worth asking, not a reason to reject an otherwise good firm.

Where an illustrative settlement actually goes

Zoom out from the fee and look at the whole disbursement, because the fee is only one of several things standing between a headline number and a deposit.

The chart contains a small lesson that gets missed. The fee in that split is described in the agreement as one third, and it comes to 31 percent of the gross settlement rather than 33. That is not a discount and not an error. It is what happens when a percentage is applied to a base smaller than the headline number. Anyone comparing two firms on their stated percentages alone is comparing labels that may be measured against different bases, which is a fair reason to ask each firm to walk through the same illustrative settlement out loud.

How medical liens and reimbursements interact with the fee

The third deduction in that chart is the one that catches people hardest, and it has its own logic that runs alongside the fee rather than through it. When a health plan, a medical payments carrier, a hospital, or a provider on a letter of protection has paid or waited for accident-related care, they generally have a right to be repaid out of the settlement. Our explainer on who pays medical bills after an accident covers how those rights arise.

For fee purposes, the important point is sequencing. Reimbursement claims are usually resolved after the settlement is agreed and before funds are disbursed, and they are typically not part of the fee base at all. The percentage is calculated on the settlement, not on the settlement minus the liens, which means a case with large liens can have a fee that looks disproportionate relative to what the client actually keeps. That is arithmetic, not misconduct, though it is the situation where a client most needs the lien reduced.

Lien reduction is also one of the places where a fee genuinely earns itself. Many payers will reduce their claim on the argument that they benefited from the client’s expense and effort in obtaining the recovery, and some jurisdictions have doctrines that formalize a proportional sharing of the fee and costs. A reduction negotiated on that basis is money the client would not have seen otherwise. Whether such a doctrine applies to a particular plan is a technical state-specific question and one to put to a licensed attorney rather than to a customer service line.

What happens if the case is lost

The clean part of the answer: no recovery, no attorney fee. That is the core promise of the arrangement and it holds. A claim that is denied, dismissed, or lost at trial produces no percentage because there is nothing to take a percentage of, and the lawyer absorbs every hour spent.

The less clean part is costs. Money already spent on records, transcripts, and experts has been spent whether or not the case succeeds, and agreements differ on who bears it in a loss. Some firms state plainly that they absorb advanced costs when a case fails, which is common and worth confirming. Others state that the client remains responsible for advanced costs regardless of outcome. Both approaches exist and neither is hidden, but the difference is the difference between walking away owing nothing and walking away owing several thousand dollars.

There is a further layer in litigated cases. Depending on the jurisdiction and the procedural history, a losing party can sometimes face exposure to certain court-related costs of the other side, and rules of that kind vary considerably. This is not something to reason about from general information. Ask the question directly in the consultation, phrased as concretely as possible: if this case recovers nothing at all, what is the total amount I could be asked to pay, and where does the agreement say so.

No win no fee: what the phrase covers and what it does not

The phrase is everywhere in advertising and it is accurate about the fee. It is silent about everything else, and that silence is where the misunderstandings live.

“No win, no fee” tells you that the percentage is contingent. It does not tell you whether advanced case costs are contingent. It does not tell you what counts as a win, which matters more than it sounds: an agreement should define recovery clearly, since a claim can resolve in forms other than a straightforward settlement check. It does not tell you whether the firm can withdraw from the case and, if so, what it may then claim. And it does not tell you how the percentage is calculated or when it steps up.

None of that makes the phrase dishonest. It makes it incomplete, in the way that all four-word summaries of a contract are incomplete. The correct response is not suspicion but specificity. Treat the slogan as the headline and the agreement as the article, and ask the firm to point to the clause that answers each of the questions above. A firm that can do that in five minutes is a firm that has explained this many times before.

The fee agreement: what to read before you sign

A contingency fee agreement is usually short, often two to four pages, and is one of the few contracts most people sign where reading every line is genuinely realistic. It should be in writing, and in many places a written fee agreement is required for contingency work rather than merely advisable.

Eight things are worth finding before you sign. The percentage, stated as a number. Every tier and the precise event that triggers each step up, expressed as something objective such as the filing of a complaint rather than as a description like “if the case becomes contested”. Whether the percentage is applied before or after costs. What categories of cost may be advanced and at what internal rates. Who is responsible for costs if there is no recovery. What happens if you or the firm ends the relationship. Whether the fee applies to every form of recovery or only to some. And who at the firm will actually handle the case day to day.

Ask for a copy to take home. A firm confident in its terms will not object, and a few hours of reading is proportionate to a document that governs a percentage of an outcome you cannot yet size. Our steps on choosing among firms cover the wider comparison, and the fee agreement is the part of it that survives the whole case.

Questions worth asking about the fee before you hire

Consultations tend to focus on the merits of the claim, which is natural, and the fee often gets three sentences at the end. Reversing that emphasis for ten minutes is worth doing, and the questions below are neither confrontational nor unusual.

What is the percentage before suit is filed, and what is it after. What exact event moves it. Is the percentage applied to the gross recovery or to the recovery after costs are deducted. What costs do you expect this particular case to require, and roughly what range should I plan for. Will you tell me before incurring a cost above a set amount. If we recover nothing, what do I owe. If I decide to end the relationship, what would the firm claim. Do you charge interest on advanced costs. And will I get an itemized settlement statement at disbursement.

Write the answers down during the meeting rather than trusting recall, then check each one against the written agreement afterward. Where the agreement and the conversation differ, the agreement wins, and the discrepancy itself is useful information about how carefully this firm communicates. That is a reasonable proxy for how the next year of your case will feel.

Changing lawyers mid-case and what the first firm may claim

Relationships fail sometimes. Calls are not returned, the case sits, or the client and the firm simply disagree about strategy. A client is generally entitled to end the relationship, and the more useful question is what happens to the fee afterward.

The first firm has done work and advanced costs, and it will normally assert a claim against any eventual recovery for the value of that work and the return of those expenses. Depending on the jurisdiction that claim can take the form of a lien on the file or the settlement proceeds. It is calculated in various ways in various places, sometimes on the reasonable value of the work performed and sometimes as a share of the eventual fee, and the mechanisms for resolving a dispute about it differ too.

What clients most want to know is whether they end up paying two full fees. In many situations the answer is no, because one fee is divided between the firms rather than charged twice. That is a general pattern rather than a rule, and it is exactly the kind of thing that varies by state. Anyone considering a change should ask the incoming firm, before signing anything, how the prior firm’s claim will be handled and whether the client’s net could be reduced by the switch. Get that answer in writing. It is also worth pausing to check whether the underlying problem is communication rather than competence, since a conversation is cheaper than a transfer.

Is the percentage reasonable for the work involved?

There is no universal answer, but there is a usable way to think about it. A contingency fee is buying four things: the lawyer’s time and judgment, the assumption of risk, the financing of costs, and the leverage that comes from the other side knowing a case can actually be tried. A percentage is reasonable when the case genuinely requires all four, and looks expensive when it requires almost none of them.

Consider the extremes to see the shape. A claim with disputed liability, contested causation, several months of treatment, an insurer that has denied, and a real prospect of litigation demands all four in quantity. A percentage of any conventional size is plausibly good value there, because the alternative for an unrepresented claimant is negotiating a complicated case alone against a professional. At the other end, a claim with an admitted-fault rear-end collision, a single emergency visit, no lost time, and an insurer already offering the documented amount requires very little of any of the four, and the fee can consume most of whatever improvement representation produces.

The honest measure is not the percentage. It is whether the represented outcome, net of fee and costs, is likely to beat the unrepresented outcome. That is a forecast rather than a calculation, which is why free consultations exist and why getting more than one is sensible. Our explainer on what a personal injury claim is worth covers how to size the underlying number that the comparison depends on.

When a contingency fee is poor value

Some situations genuinely do not reward representation, and saying so is more useful than pretending every claim needs a lawyer.

Property damage only, with no injury at all, is the clearest case. There is no injury claim for a percentage to attach to and the dispute is usually about repair estimates or a vehicle valuation, which is a documentation exercise rather than a legal one. A minor injury with a small, fully healed course of treatment and an insurer already paying the documented bills is the second. If the gap between the offer and the documented total is a few hundred dollars, a percentage of the whole recovery is a large price for closing it.

The third is subtler. Where a claim is capped by a low policy limit and the insurer has already offered the limit, there is nothing left to win, because no amount of skill extracts money from a policy that has none. Representation may still be worth having for the lien negotiation and for confirming that no other coverage exists, and some firms will handle exactly that on reduced terms, which is a fair thing to ask about. Handling a small claim yourself is covered in our steps on negotiating an injury settlement, and running your own numbers first in the settlement estimator is a sensible starting point.

When a contingency fee is obviously worth it

The opposite profile is just as recognizable, and in it the fee is rarely the interesting question.

Serious injuries with surgery, permanent impairment, or a long recovery involve valuation arguments that are genuinely technical and figures large enough that a percentage difference in outcome dwarfs a percentage difference in fee. Disputed liability, whether that means a contested account of the crash, an allegation of shared fault, or multiple potentially responsible parties, moves the case into territory where the rules themselves become the argument. Our explainer on comparative negligence covers how quickly a fault percentage rewrites a valuation.

Two more profiles belong here. Claims where the insurer has denied outright or made an offer far below the documented economic loss, because that behaviour signals a fight and fights reward leverage. And claims complicated by structure rather than severity: a commercial defendant, a government entity with its own procedural regime, a claim involving a work injury and a separate third party, or a case with layered coverages. In all of these, the question stops being whether the fee is worth it and becomes which firm to hire, which is where our explainer on whether to accept a first offer becomes relevant, since a lowball opening is often the trigger for the whole decision.

Whether the percentage is negotiable

Sometimes, and the only way to find out is to ask, politely and once. Nobody is offended by the question and a firm that reacts badly to it has told you something useful for free.

Leverage exists where the firm’s risk is low and the recovery is likely to be substantial. Undisputed liability, a well documented injury, a claim unlikely to require suit, or a large expected recovery all reduce the risk the percentage is pricing. Leverage disappears where the case is hard, where the outcome is genuinely uncertain, where the firm will be advancing serious money against a real possibility of recovering nothing, or where a state rule sets the terms in that category of case.

Broaden the question beyond the headline rate, because two other terms often move more easily. Whether costs come off before the percentage is applied is worth asking about directly, since as the earlier arithmetic showed it is worth the fee rate multiplied by the costs. So is the treatment of costs in a loss. A firm unwilling to move on the percentage may be entirely willing to be clear that it absorbs costs if the case fails, and for many clients that is the more valuable concession.

How state rules shape what a fee can be

Contingency fees are regulated, and the regulation is not uniform. Professional conduct rules in every jurisdiction address what a lawyer may charge and generally require that a fee be reasonable, that a contingency agreement be in writing, and that the client receive a written statement at the end of the matter showing the outcome and the calculation. The details differ.

Beyond those general requirements, some jurisdictions impose specific limits in particular categories of case, sometimes with a scale that reduces the permitted percentage as the recovery grows, and sometimes tied to a defined type of claim. Which jurisdictions do this, in which case types, and at what levels are exactly the kind of facts that change and that would be irresponsible to state as current here. The mechanism is the point: a limit of that kind, where it exists, overrides whatever a fee agreement says.

That leads to a simple instruction rather than a research project. Ask the firm directly whether any rule in your state limits the fee in your type of case, and ask them to identify it. A firm practicing in the area will know immediately. Confirm anything that matters to your decision with a licensed attorney in your state or with the state bar rather than with any general description, this explainer included, because a fee rule that changed last year is not a detail an article can be trusted to have caught.

Reading the settlement statement at disbursement

At the end of a represented claim you should receive a settlement statement, sometimes called a disbursement or closing statement, and it is the document that converts everything in this explainer into your actual number.

Read it against the fee agreement line by line. Does the gross figure match the settlement you agreed. Is the percentage the one in the agreement, applied to the base the agreement specifies. Is every cost itemized rather than presented as a single total. Do the lien and reimbursement amounts match the reduction letters you were shown. Does the arithmetic actually add up, gross minus fee minus costs minus liens equals net. And is anything listed that you have not seen before.

Questions at this stage are normal and expected. This is the one moment where every number in the case is visible in one place, and it is far easier to ask about an unfamiliar line before funds are disbursed than afterward. Keep the statement permanently. It is the only complete record of what the claim produced and where it went, and it is the document you will want if any question about the case surfaces later.

Common misunderstandings about contingency fees

The same handful of errors recur, and each has a straightforward correction.

That the fee is the only deduction. It is not, and case costs plus lien repayments frequently exceed people’s expectations. That “no win, no fee” covers costs. It covers the fee, and costs are a separate term to check. That the percentage is fixed by law at a third. It is a convention, and the governing number is in your agreement. That a higher post-suit percentage means the firm profits from delay. It prices a workload several times larger, and a flat rate would create the worse incentive.

Three more are worth naming. That comparing firms on their headline percentages is a meaningful comparison, when one may apply that rate to the gross and another to the amount after costs. That the fee is calculated after liens are paid, when the fee base is normally the settlement rather than what is left after repayments. And that signing a fee agreement is a formality, when it is the one document in the entire case whose terms the client can still influence. The arithmetic that follows from all of this is the reason the companion below works in net terms rather than gross.

How the fee compares with hourly and flat-fee work

Contingency pricing is not the only way legal work is sold, and seeing it beside the alternatives clarifies what it is actually for.

Hourly billing charges for time whether or not the matter succeeds, which suits work with a predictable scope and a client able to fund it, and it is how the insurer’s side of an injury case is generally paid. Flat fees price a defined deliverable and suit work where the output is well specified. Both require the client to pay regardless of outcome, which is precisely the condition an injured person usually cannot meet.

The contingency fee trades a higher price on success for a zero price on failure. Judged after a good outcome it always looks expensive, because the risk that justified it has evaporated and only the result remains visible. Judged before the outcome, when nobody knows whether the claim will produce anything, it looks like what it is: a transfer of risk from the person who cannot bear it to the firm that can. Which framing feels right depends entirely on where in the case you are standing, and the fair comparison is the one made at the start rather than the one made at the end.

The bottom line

A contingency fee is a percentage of a recovery, paid only if there is a recovery, and it exists because the alternative would price most injured people out of the civil justice system entirely. The commonly repeated figure of about a third, stepping up if suit is filed, is a convention rather than a rule, and the only number that governs your claim is the one printed in the agreement you sign.

Two details do more work than the headline percentage. Costs are not fees: filing charges, records, transcripts, and experts are repaid on top of the percentage, and whether you owe them in a loss is a separate clause worth finding. And the calculation basis matters, because applying the percentage before or after costs changes your net by exactly the rate multiplied by the costs, which was $2,000 in this explainer’s illustrative $90,000 example and grows with every expert retained. Read the agreement, ask what happens in a total loss, ask when the percentage steps up, and ask for an itemized statement at the end. Then take the specifics to an attorney licensed where your claim sits, because fee rules, cost practices, and the treatment of liens differ from state to state and are not settled by anything you read online.

Everything above describes how contingency arrangements are typically structured and nothing more. TortWise publishes explanations of the injury claims process; it is not a law firm, it does not represent anyone, and reading this creates no attorney-client relationship of any kind. The percentages, costs, liens, and settlement figures used here were chosen to make arithmetic legible and were not drawn from any dataset, any firm’s schedule, or any real case. What a lawyer may charge, when a written agreement is required, whether any limit applies to your category of claim, how advanced costs are treated in a loss, and what a former firm may claim after a change of counsel are all governed by rules that differ between states and are revised over time. Before signing a fee agreement, take it to an attorney licensed where your claim sits and have the actual terms explained against the actual rules.

Edited by Hamza Hai, MBA · Editor

Hamza Hai is the editor of TortWise. She holds an MBA and reviews the site's articles against our editorial standards, checking that every figure is labelled for what it is, that nothing is presented as verified fact without a source the reader can check, and that the writing stays useful to a non-specialist.

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