Perhaps the lawyer with a conscience is not a mere Hollywood myth. David Russell, the senior partner at Towells, a Wakefield firm, astonished many in the profession last week with the announcement that his firm was resigning from a group of solicitors fighting to win compensation for sick miners. Not only did Towells resign from the group, citing anger at the widespread practice deployed by other law firms in the group of taking a slice of the miners' damages in addition to claiming fees from the Government, but Russell pulled no punches when he declared the decision was intended to “evidence my contempt for the solicitors… and the Law Society”. Russell accused the latter of “closing ranks” with the other law firms involved and thereby compromising its role as regulator of the profession.

It was impossible not to applaud the firm for taking a moral stance. Alas, it is in the minority. Despite the ready congruity of law and ethics at undergraduate level, the reality remains that quotidian exposure to the legal profession soon shatters whatever illusions of idealism one may have preserved through the morass of academia, alcohol and experimental drug-fuelled sex. Such, at least, was my experience.

The problem is that law lecturers do not prepare putative solicitors for the omnipresent timesheet. They spend far too much time elucidating legal principles, talking about quaint concepts such as right and wrong. However, little or no time is devoted to what being a solicitor actually entails. In a shock that was both profound and long-lasting, I soon found that my chief responsibility as a solicitor was the slavish recording of my time in order that the powers that be could duly bill clients.

That anyone would want to bill a client was my first wake-up call. The mechanics of the activity left me yet more disturbed. Though my own recording of time remained Proustian in its attempt to encapsulate exactly what I had or had not done — not least, because of the scrupulous ethics of my various principals — I soon learned of young solicitors in other firms who had adopted the timesheet as their flexible friend.

The scramble to advance up the legal ladder would mean hitting one’s target of "billable hours" every month. Targets would range from the challenging (175) to the marginally more realistic (110) and back again to the risibly insane (200). Time would be recorded in "units" of six, ten or fifteen minutes, depending on the firm (City firms tend to opt for the 15 minute block). If a client called in and said: “I have read your letter. It makes sense. Yes, sue the bastards,” this 30 second message would have to be noted on the timesheet and an attendance note made of its content. But while this may take less than five minutes, in accordance with the prevailing timesheet orthodoxy it would be recorded as a minimum of six minutes, maybe ten and possibly even fifteen.

That this appears inequitable has not stopped it being The Way of Things. A solicitor can have a one minute conversation with a client and in today’s new-fangled technological world, contemporaneously enter the fact onto the firm’s computerized time-recording system. The trouble is that The System allows for nothing less than the designated block of time (again, be it six, ten or fifteen minutes) being recorded. When one considers that even a junior solicitor’s time in a City firm will be charged out at around £180 an hour, the timesheet system rapidly equates to extraordinary levels of pure profit.

Granted, the partners will sometimes take an axe to large bills, the ones that they know wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny. But their minions still have to hit their billable hours targets and they still need to make money. The pressure forces solicitors to get creative. Short of a few hours? No problem: use the timesheet to put down some time on that big corporate litigation matter. Not sure that one’s impoverished client will pay all your costs? Simple: stick some of the time on the file of a multinational client; they’ve got money to burn and won’t query the bill. Low on hours because of illness? Doesn't that just mean you’ve been at home thinking about the case? Stick it down as double time.

Law firms do not, of course, encourage staff to pad out their hours. Indeed, the performance of solicitors in relation to their billable hours is a closely guarded secret, known only to the partners. But information as to who is hitting what targets always seems to leak, often making for an atmosphere of barely constrained malevolence among the rank and file. Fair enough, you might say — it’s a dog-eat-dog world. But the cynicism with which the timesheet is manipulated can amount to nothing short of legitimized fraud.

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