«Success fee» as an important component of ensuring the constitutional right of a person to professional legal assistance.

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to study the legal essence of such a method of calculating the lawyer’s fee as «success fee», disclosing its positive and negative features, as well as the experience of the European Court of Human Rights and the experience of foreign countries in its application. In the context of disclosing the subject of research, both to achieve the goal of scien- tific work and to ensure the completeness, objectivity, reliability and persuasiveness of the results, the author used a set of general and special methods that are characteristic of legal science. In particular, the origin and long historical path of development of this legal insti- tution were studied with the help of the historical method. The system-structural method made it possible to formulate the general structure of the study, and the dialectical one – to analyze first of all legislative provisions and jurisprudence on the possibility of using the «success fee» as a way to calculate the lawyer’s fee. Using a comparative legal method, the legislation of foreign countries was analyzed, which provided an opportunity to use their positive experience in terms of calculating the amount of attorney’s fees. This article discloses the scientific approaches of researchers to determine the nature of the expenses on legal assistance primarily concerning the nature of the «success fee», its positive and negative features, as well as analyzes the provisions of domestic and foreign legislators on the possibility of consolidating in the contract for legal assistance a condition that indicates such a way of calculating the amount of wages of a lawyer as a «fee for suc- cess». Significant part of the work is devoted to the analysis of the law enforcement practice of Ukrainian courts and the European Court of Human Rights, both in general as to the pos- sibility and expediency of the existence of certain criteria for limiting its size. It is noted that a significant number of foreign countries do not prohibit the possibility of using the «success fee», taking into account the existence of certain restrictions concern- ing the categories of cases, or the perception of it as an additional reward.