PROFESSIONAL FEES.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume IV, Issue 1049, 15 September 1883, Page 4

PROFESSIONAL FEES.

H the payment of large professional fees the leisute Hour says : —“ Mr Benjamin, by far the ablest advocate in the most lucrative department of legal practice, received 1.25,000 in his most fortunate year—about half the yearly income many a second-rate architect or engineer or newspaper proprietor has'made in the present century. The famous lawyer who has just ceased earning incomes that perhaps average I, a year since he took silk in 187.2, would have been more liberally reWatdtd in Elizabeth’s England, and quite as lavishly remunerated in Charles 11. London. The bare statement of the fee tells little of a lawyer’s remuneration. Though considerable fees are sometimes taken for little trouble, or |ven no work at all, the sensationally 'magnificent fees of legal annals are always found on inquiry to have been payments for unusually heavy and arduous service. If he had not won •the respect of solicitors by his dexterous management of the defence, Edward Law would have had cause to regret his employment, in behalf of Warren Hastings, who paid his leading counsel something under L 4,000. On taking account of special outlay for the cause and the value of the business, it compelled him to decline; the ’elhiheht advocate, who received a fee of L 6,000 in the famous case of Small ,y r Attwood, had reason to think himself under-paid and ill-paid. Serious payments for serious service, the big fees; that now and then pass from clients toncounsel through the fingers of intervening solicitors, differ widely from the munificent prodigalities by which sick .millionaires occasionally exhibit their fear of, death and the gratitude to the doctor. Perhaps the largest fee ever paid'to a medical man was the fee of 1,000 guineas which Sir Henry Thompson received for, a single visit—without any operation— to Oppenheira, the Cologne capitalist, when already in extremis, determined to lure the famous London surgeon to his bedside at any cost. Of course such a prodigious fee demanded by the surgeon in the hope that the demand would be defclinedj and paid under altogether exceptional circumstances—is a solitary aid abnormal incident that may scarcely be usetjl. as an, example pf the ; remuneration !of the ‘faculty.’’ Even in the annals of medicine and surgery it must remain a tfcupg of humor and surprise.”