The Lawyer’s Share: $505.9M in Attorney Fees Paid by the U.S. Treasury

For 858 payments, the data shows both the attorney fee and the client’s principal on the same row. On those payments, fees total $156.9M against $393.2M of principal.

Measured per payment, the average fee share is 33.8% of the combined fee-plus-principal amount. Measured in dollars, it is 28.5%. The two differ because small payments tend to carry proportionally larger fee shares, and a simple average counts a $20,000 payment the same as a $20 million one.

We aggregated the payment-level Judgment Fund reports to Congress published by the U.S. Treasury Bureau of the Fiscal Service (114,210 payment rows with record dates from 2009 to 2025). Of those, 3,009 rows report an attorney-fee amount greater than zero; the remaining 111,201 rows have no attorney fee broken out and are excluded from all fee statistics.

Important caveats

• A row is a payment, not a case. One lawsuit can generate multiple payment rows, so per-payment statistics (averages, medians, fee shares) are not per-case statistics.
• Year labels are the calendar year of the record date. The record date is always the fiscal-year-end reporting date (September 30), so each year corresponds to the federal fiscal year covered by that annual report — not the calendar year a payment was sent.
• Fees embedded in lump-sum settlements are invisible. When a settlement is paid as a single principal amount and counsel is paid out of it privately (as in typical contingency arrangements), no attorney fee appears in this data. The $505.9M total therefore reflects only fees the government itself paid as a separate line item — a floor, not the full picture of what lawyers earned from these cases.
• The fee-share analysis covers only the 858 payments where both an attorney fee and a principal amount appear on the same row.
• Citation and agency labels are reproduced as reported by Treasury, without consolidation.
• All dollar amounts are nominal (not inflation-adjusted).

The full aggregated dataset is available above as CSV downloads under a CC BY 4.0 license. Source data is published by the U.S. Treasury Bureau of the Fiscal Service. This study is a companion to our federal government payments analysis, which examines the same Judgment Fund data from the claimant’s side.