Law clients everywhere will no doubt have been thrilled by this newspaper's report on Friday of a judge lambasting the level of fees charged by the law firm that represented Research in Motion, the makers of BlackBerry, in a patent dispute.

Mr Justice Floyd questioned how Allen & Overy, a leading City firm, could have racked up nearly £5.2m in costs on a trial that lasted just five days. Given the number of hours the firm claimed to have put in, the judge said the firm's associates should be able to recite "all the documents in the case by heart". The judge, an intellectual property expert himself, said the dispute with Visto, a US-based wireless technology company, was "not a particularly heavy" one and did not justify two associates doing 4,540 hours work at a cost of nearly £2m. That works out at an impressive £440 an hour for each of the two relative juniors - but lawyers are not the only people in the City, or Wall Street, who have been overcharging. At least if lawyers find their fee income falling in coming months they will not demand that taxpayers bail them out, as their banking clients have done.