City View

The price is not right

YOU have to laugh. An internal memo from deep within Clifford Chance, the world’s largest law firm, has junior lawyers complaining that they are obliged to "pad" their clients’ bills. Primarily this is by clocking extra hours.

An emergency meeting of Clifford Chance’s leadership is to offer assurances that no such habit is uniform and that all clients are offered modest bills for the best services of lean minds. Clifford Chance is not another Enron about to implode. It is only an immensely comical insight into the odd processes by which big corporate lawyers can bamboozle their customers.

If you are paying for a spectrum of services from normal diligence to the most acute commercial intelligence, how do you price them? Some lawyers are cheap at chunky bills. Others are grossly overpaid for their dross input.

The leaked internal memo complains that junior lawyers have to invent problems so they can bill 2420 hours a year. They also say that "under-houred" senior lawyers are given extra work to bulk up their hours.

Clifford Chance will probably make a series of promises of better behaviour but the veil has been lifted on the murky world of lawyer’s bills.

The price is not right

THE Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals says that the world’s bear species is approaching extinction in the wild as the Chinese are convinced bear bile has near miraculous medicinal qualities. Nobody ever seems to challenge the veracity of these ancient folk medicines. Does bear bile save human lives or ease human pain - or is it antique nonsense?

A world without bears, or rather with only a few fugitive ones in zoos, would be a sadder place. With the death of Mary, Edinburgh Zoo’s European brown bear, it seems Scotland is now a bearless nation.

The bears in the Pyrenees, the Alps and the Dolomites enhance the excitement of tourists. Mountains with bears roaming free have different and enhanced reputations. The Romans used to acclaim Caledonian bears as the finest in their Empire. Let the Royal Society and Scottish Natural Heritage repopulate the Highlands with bears. It would do more for the tourism trades than trying to wean Scottish catering off its natural surliness.

The price is not right

THE number of profit warnings emerging from British companies continues to rise. The Treasury’s income from taxing us all continues to be more modest than expected. Growth is far short of Gordon Brown’s assumptions. It is all very bleak, or at least officially bleak.

Out in the more tangible world of retail sales and house prices, there is simply no evidence of pessimism running rampant.

One explanation between official gloom and real world bounce is that we all treat the results of major plcs far too seriously. Tomorrow, BP’s results will receive coverage out of all proportion to its real importance - 95 per cent of the British economy is completely outside the world of the large corporations. Most people work for tiny ventures employing no more than ten people. They are mostly thriving. A large swathe of people are employed by the public sector and therefore totally immune to the marketplace of traded goods and services.

Mounting numbers of profit warnings reflect only the massive firms. They can be disregarded.