Katy Dowell of the Lawyer reports that the best QCs are demanding a "Russian premium" of £1,500 an hour – "on top of the brief fee, that is".
Senior barristers have come to expect a "Russian premium" of up to £1,500 an hour (on top of the "brief fee"), according to The Lawyer, a trade paper.
When she appeared at the Old Bailey in 1951, defending Liverpool dockers accused of incitement to strike, the newspapers announced that she received £750 and £150 a day, then the highest brief fee paid to a woman.
This sum is being claimed from Attiya, who will also have to cover his own costs, which amount to less than £200,000, with brief's fees of £30,000.
Sometimes she's seen only fleetingly – the briefest of fee-fi-fo-fums in last year's Into the Woods, and just one appearance opposite Vicious housemate Ian McKellen in this week's Mr Holmes.
And Mr. Wallach, despite his Cummingsesque disdain for such pretentions as capital letters, attached to his brief justifying the fee a clipping from The San Francisco Examiner headlined "San Franciso's elite, big-buck hot-shot lawyers," in which he was prominently mentioned.
A brief examination of fees will explain why.
In such circumstances, the lessor may also include a brief explanation of the fee structure in the segregated disclosure.
The third-party defendant has requested, in its brief, that attorney's fees and double costs be awarded on the basis that the appeal is frivolous.
I did have a brief spell at a fee-paying boarding school in Sussex, but owing to a misunderstanding involving a night-club in Piccadilly, a 4am trip on the milk train from Victoria and the theft of some Penguin biscuits, that association was swiftly and ingloriously terminated.
The payment of agency fees, the brief observed, can be construed as a limitation on freedom only if one's definition of freedom is so "absolute and extreme" as to exclude the common good, which is precisely the kind of desolate freedom capital has in mind — after all, alienation, too, is a kind of freedom, maybe the ideal kind, under capitalism.
