Is the £1,000-an-hour corporate partner already here? As a headline rate – meaning what clients are quoted in pitches – the answer is no. But, as research among senior corporate counsel in Legal Week’s The Verdict survey suggests this week, in a handful of cases, clients have paid that much for the services of a top lawyer.
That finding comes against a backdrop of unease, with legal service inflation and a widespread view that clients are paying for the current round of pay hikes and surging partner profits – and they particularly resent paying for the ‘training’ of junior lawyers.
