I once asked a barrister's clerk a question so simple I felt slightly rude asking it. How much have I paid you, in total, on this case? A number. In pounds.
It took a week. First an invoice. Then an email quietly recalling that invoice, a thing that apparently happens even to people who charge by the hour for precision. Then a fresh invoice. Then a statement so opaque I had to write back and request, in plain English, two documents a competent teenager could produce: what I still owe, and what I have already paid. I got there in the end. The correspondence about how much I owed ran longer than some of the actual legal work.
That week is the whole business in miniature.
When you sell hours, you sell hours. A plumber who fixed the tap in ten minutes and charged for ten minutes would be called good value. A lawyer who did the equivalent would be having a quiet word with his firm about his recording rate. The incentive runs precisely backwards. The slower the thinking, the thicker the file, the better the year. Nobody has to be greedy for this to happen. They just have to bill the way everyone bills, and the way everyone bills rewards exactly the thing you are paying to avoid.
So the verbs breed. There is time to draft. Time to review the draft. Time to consider the review. Time to attend to the regulatory implications of the consideration. A five sentence email stops being a five sentence email and becomes a small industrial process with its own supply chain. A junior writes it. A senior checks it. You pay for the writing and the checking, on the comforting theory that two lawyers touching a document makes it twice as safe rather than twice as expensive.
Then there is the double act. You hire a solicitor. The solicitor hires a barrister. The barrister's fee turns up not as the barrister's invoice but as a line on the solicitor's invoice, helpfully labelled a disbursement, so that you pay the barrister through the solicitor who has also billed you for the work of hiring the barrister.
Two meters, one afternoon.
People call this a scam. It is not, and the truth is worse than the accusation. A scam needs a villain. This needs nobody. The split exists for a real reason: solicitors run the matter, barristers are specialists you rent for the hard part, and in theory you pay only for what you need. In practice everyone behaves impeccably, the bill still doubles, and not one person in the chain is responsible for the total. You are the only one who cares what it adds up to, and you are the one least able to read it.
You would, ideally, read the retainer letter before signing it. Good luck. To understand one properly you would need to hire a lawyer, who would bill you for the favour and send you a retainer letter of their own. Somewhere in that loop is the entire business model.
The letters do at least have a phrase for the timing of all this. Fees are "due on presentation." Payable the instant they reach you. Their time is metered to the minute and sacred. Yours is a rounding error. You are expected to pay within the hour. They will answer your simple question within the week. The hours I spent chasing, reconciling and translating their statements into something legible never appeared on any invoice, because I am the single participant in this transaction whose time is officially worth nothing, and I am the one funding everyone whose time is not.
In fairness, some of it is real. The compliance is mandatory, the client checks protect you as much as them, and a good advocate at the right moment is worth every penny of the brief fee, because losing costs more than all of it. Fine. The objection was never that law costs money. The objection is that the price is set by a clock, and the clock has never once volunteered that the job was done.
I never did learn why a one line answer took a week. But I think I finally understand the economics. A quick answer is free, and nothing in that building is built to make things that are free.