The Chairman of the Royal Society of Arts and head of private equity firm, Risk Capital Partners, Luke Johnson, picked up that thread recently in the FT. The source of his lawyer-induced rising blood pressure?

Last week we bought control of a business… One law firm [one of the four it took to do the deal] which had quoted £35,000, announced two days before completion that they intended to charge £110,000.

Try pretenting you’ve never heard that one before.

Mr Johnson must be used to this sort of thing but it clearly hit a nerve this time because he didn’t limit himself to quoting lines of Shakespeare.

Impertinence.

It baffles me how they can have the impertinence to call themselves professionals. Such behaviour makes cowboy builders look like choirboys.

Economic friction.

Research shows that lawyers are a huge drain on wealth creation. A 2007 study suggested the annual economic cost of the US’s tort system was $865bn (€647bn, £570bn). Yet more of them are qualifying than ever before.

Wasted talent.

I used to work next to a law school – I despaired every time I passed by, wondering how so many of its bright graduates would end up destroying value for our communities, inhibiting innovation, placing a burden on enterprise and killing jobs.

The West is no longer wild.

The west is overlawyered.

More> (if you’re feeling masochistic)

For lawyers, particularly junior ones, that might all seem rather unfair. The job is demanding and the pay is hardly in line with traders or footballers. But even the esteemed Legal Week wasn’t prepared to put up much of a defence. In fact they agreed with much of the article. Their conclusion: “The legal profession is but one of many mirrors of our day. The reflection isn’t always that pretty, but that’s the game. Laugh it up.”

You’re welcome to try though.