800
Opinion of the Court
instructs "a reasonable fee," which could be measured by a lodestar calculation. But § 406(b)'s language does not exclude contingent-fee contracts that produce fees no higher than the 25 percent ceiling. Such contracts are the most common fee arrangement between attorneys and Social Security claimants. See Department of Health and Human Services, Social Security Administration, Office of Hearings and Appeals, Report to Congress: Attorney Fees Under Title II of the Social Security Act 15, 66, 70 (July 1988) (hereinafter SSA Report); Brief for National Organization of Social Security Claimants' Representatives as Amicus Curiae 1-2. Looking outside the statute's inconclusive text, we next take into account, as interpretive guides, the origin and standard application of the proffered approaches.
The lodestar method has its roots in accounting practices adopted in the 1940's to allow attorneys and firms to determine whether fees charged were sufficient to cover overhead and generate suitable profits. W. Ross, The Honest Hour: The Ethics of Time-Based Billing by Attorneys 16 (1996) (hereinafter Honest Hour). An American Bar Association (ABA) report, published in 1958, observed that attorneys' earnings had failed to keep pace with the rate of inflation; the report urged attorneys to record the hours spent on each case in order to ensure that fees ultimately charged afforded reasonable compensation for counsels' efforts. See Special Committee on Economics of Law Practice, The 1958 Lawyer and His 1938 Dollar 9-10 (reprint 1959).
Hourly records initially provided only an internal accounting check. See Honest Hour 19. The fees actually charged might be determined under any number of methods: the annual retainer; the fee-for-service method; the "eyeball" method, under which the attorney estimated an annual fee for regular clients; or the contingent-fee method, recognized by this Court in Stanton v. Embrey, 93 U. S. 548, 556 (1877), and formally approved by the ABA in 1908. See Honest Hour 13-19. As it became standard accounting practice to
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