Jude Bellingham earns around £11.4m a year at Real Madrid, which equates to around £220,000 per week
The FT is running an article in which the practice of paying newly qualified lawyers base salaries of £150,000 is labelled “insane”.
I know a couple of young lawyers who are getting this level of pay in their mid twenties – they are level-headed and getting on with life. Glastonbury is the big thing, work, something that they do to pay the bills. I also know that many of these future big hitters walk away before they earn the million pound pay packets, I know a couple that didn’t and they also seem happy adjusted people.
I sat in Slaughter and May’s staff canteen last week , the former partner I was having a cup of tea with, described the firm’s culture as entrepreneurial. He once boasted he submitted the biggest monthly bill to any client ever. The client was the Government – “us”. He is now commissioner for financial inclusion.
I know entrepreneurs who started at Slaughter and May, I have written about one on this blog.
We pay lawyers what they demand to be paid and they get paid out of the fees paid to them by organisations we work for. Without the lawyers, the deals wouldn’t get done, or they’d get done badly. With the lawyers, we have a series of controls that keeps business operating withing certain tramlines. We may want like Jack Cade to “kill all the lawyers”, but we rely on them too much not to pay their bills.
That said, wage inflation must lead to fee inflation and ultimately there is a level of legal costs beyond which we cannot go. When the cost of the lawyers makes a deal untenable , we have gone from an entrepreneurial mindset to a broken model where the entrepreneurial lawyer has broken the deal’s back.
Since the most common profession of those who make the law in parliament is “you’ve guessed it…..”, it is difficult to see parliament negotiating wage caps or even decency levels on commercial lawyers. Of course certain parts of the legal system where the Government is deeply involved (crime, family law etc) , scrutiny of fees is a matter of Government and fixed fee scales do apply.
But when we move into the world of corporate law, where the fees are highest, the fees set and agreed are regulated by global best/worst practice.
Britain has a legal system that is the envy of the world, the American law firms that have set the huge base levels of fees for associates are doing so in London because London is a great place to run a legal practice. These fees feed into the UK economy and pay bills for those who would never set foot in the polished halls of these law firm’s city offices.
There are already 370 comments on the FT article, there will be hundreds of thousands of readers coming to the article out of curiosity, envy or to find reason to justify their next pay rise.
The numbers of lawyers who get paid this amount is tiny, these are the Jude Bellinghams of the legal world, not the hoi-poloi to be found in league football.
In a strange way, I celebrate that they are being paid this money in this Country, in my City and to people some of whom I know. The market is being tested and for this market, the ceiling has yet to be found.