In many ways, the public relations battle Clifford Chance (CC) has been fighting following the infamous New York memo by a group of associates is one it is fighting for the entire legal profession. For although the annual target cited in the memo of 2,420 billable hours is considered excessive even by New York standards, nobody is pretending that the issue of high billing targets is confined to CC. This is brought home by this week’s Big Question survey of more than 100 senior lawyers up and down the country.
Asked how much padding they believed occurred within the UK’s top 50 firms, a staggering 26% of the respondents said they believed it “happens all the time” while a further 51% said they thought it “sometimes happens”.
