Almost every commercial contract is enforced as written. A fee agreement between a lawyer and a client is not. The reasonableness requirement operates independently of the client's consent, which means a fee the client negotiated, understood, and agreed to can still be reduced, disgorged, or made the basis for discipline. This article explains why that rule exists, how reasonableness is actually measured, why contingency fees are policed more closely than hourly fees despite being freely chosen, how court-awarded fees under fee-shifting statutes follow an entirely separate logic from fees owed under a contract, and why the two questions — what the client owes and what the loser pays — regularly produce different numbers on the same case.