The billable hour’s much-touted demise is akin to the expiry of Monty Python’s suspiciously inanimate parrot. Has it gone to join the ‘choir invisible’ or not?

Yes! says the never knowingly understated newspaper City AM, which last week delighted London commuters with a meaty feature on ‘the death of the billable hour’.

No! says the Law Society’s annual benchmarking survey, which declares it ‘unlikely that the much discussed death of the billable hour’ will become a reality ‘in the foreseeable future’.

Perhaps the billable hour is not ‘bleedin’ deceased’, but merely ‘resting’?

At any rate, Chancery Lane’s survey reckons we’re asking the wrong question anyway. The real poser is productivity. Law firms are still charging by the hour, en masse – they’re just not charging for enough of them.

Working-from-home, lazy-Gen-Z wokery is to blame, Obiter reckons. (We don’t think that really. Please don’t write in.)

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