I BEGAN MY DISCUSSION OF CONTINGENCY FEES BY ASSERTING that the contingency fee is the most underappreciated of all of the elemental forces that shape our legal and political systems. I then set out to raise the level of awareness by showing how contingency fees have empowered lawyers to shape our civil justice system in ways that further their financial interests while relegating the interests of the polity to secondary importance. The result, I concluded, is a loosely structured, cumbersome system for compensating accident victims, which is extraordinarily costly, inconsistent, unpredictable, and inefficient. Nor is there much solid evidence that the tort system promotes injury avoidance. What it best promotes, instead, are lawyers' fees. Under the guise of financing the system for compensating accident victims, tort lawyers have increased their effective hourly rates, adjusted for inflation, by more than 1,000 percent in the past forty-five years. This is far beyond any level needed to assure access to the civil justice system and well above the level of risk being assumed by tort lawyers.