Flat-fee defense contracts pay lawyers to do less work per client

In many U.S. jurisdictions, indigent defense is delivered through flat-fee contracts: a private attorney receives a fixed dollar amount to handle all cases in a given period, regardless of volume or complexity. One California misdemeanor contract attorney handled 250-300 cases per month — 11 to 14 per day — under a flat-fee arrangement. The financial incentive is perverse: every hour spent investigating, filing motions, or preparing for trial is an hour that reduces the attorney's effective hourly rate. Hiring an expert witness or an investigator comes directly out of the attorney's own pay. The rational economic behavior is to spend as little time as possible per case and push clients toward guilty pleas. Empirical research confirms this: contract and assigned-counsel lawyers achieve fewer dismissals, fewer acquittals, fewer deferred sentences, and longer prison sentences than public defender office attorneys. This system persists because it is the cheapest option for county governments, and there is no meaningful oversight or quality control over contract attorneys' performance.