But investigators in Pennsylvania acknowledged the difficulty of the case.
A letter from the Zambian inspector general, sent in 2004, acknowledges the difficulty of the case.
In theory, this means fees should vary with the difficulty of the case, the expertise of the lawyer, the time required and the result obtained.
"Legal fees are not competitive because lawyers have colluded to maintain a fixed 33percentt rate regardless of the nature or difficulty of the case," Professor Brickman said.
But a majority of the five-member panel of the court, the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, ruled that whether the fee was reasonable should be determined at a trial, based on a further exploration of the discussions that led to the fee agreement and the difficulty of the case.
Other moments revealed Judge Scheindlin to be struggling with an essential difficulty of the case: how to measure the constitutionality of not one single street stop — that is a familiar task for judges — but millions of stops conducted over many years.
Root canal treatment was finished in one to three visits according to pathological status, time available, the difficulty of the case and patient cooperation.
This scoring system is also of value in obtaining informed consent of patients undergoing phacoemulsification surgery, in terms of imparting to the patient both the likely difficulty of the case, and the risk of complication.
To control for differences in the difficulty of the case sets, the three sets of five cases were also balanced so that each set was addressed the same number of times in each arm of the trial.
The first score indicated the perceived difficulty of the case, and the second score, the degree of experience that they thought a trainee would require in order to have performed the same case without complication.
