Friday reading for the rest of the week.

Not a week goes by without a story about a legal matter that has been badly run. Budgets out of control. Cases called hopeless by the people who took them on in the first place. Costs arguments that feel like a trip back to before the CPR existed. Meanwhile the profession argues about how to charge. Fixed fees, capped fees, value pricing, subscription — whatever is in this year’s conference programme. It is a real argument, and I have taken part in it.

The general counsel slid a single sheet across the table. "That's your last four matters — hours billed against what our model says the work should take now the disclosure tool does what it does. The gap's about thirty per cent." For years pricing reform was debated almost entirely among lawyers while the billable hour carried on undisturbed. That period is ending — not because the arguments improved, but because clients stopped asking and started mandating.

"We looked at fixed fees," the practice head told me, in the tone people use for a holiday they nearly booked. The working group's paper is still on the shared drive; the firm still writes off the overruns it daren't pass on. The arguments for alternative fees were never the problem — the pressure was. AI has made the gap between time spent and value delivered impossible to keep out of sight. The alternatives work. The open question is whether a firm has the discipline to run