Clifford Chance might be contemplating scrapping the billable hour as a tool for evaluating lawyers, but it’s proceeding with caution.

The Magic Circle firm announced last week that it won’t use billed hours to assess the performance of some of its lawyers. But the pilot programme comes with a series of limiting factors. For starters, it only applies to attorneys in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, United Arab Emirates – out of the firm’s 33 offices on six continents – and it’s limited to just one year.