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Lord Thomas's comments are so typical of senior judges, including Lord Dyson and further back Lord Woolf.

The basic problem is that they have not the vaguest idea of the amount of work that we solicitors have to do to get a matter ready for even an interlocutory hearing, let alone a full trial.

They have nearly all led somewhat sheltered and pampered lives at the Bar, where all the grunt work was done by others. It would be extremely useful if they had to work in a busy litigation solicitors' office for 6 months as part of their training, so they could get some idea of just how much work goes in to those beautifully prepared bundles.

In a way, we've shot ourselves in the foot by generally working so hard on preparation and getting things in order for a hearing. Because for the most part documents are fairly well prepared and comprehensible and the hearing passes off without too much difficulty the judge only sees the tip of a huge iceberg of work. So when he casually calls for skeleton arguments in some trivial dispute he probably thinks, "It's only a couple of pages, it won't take them more than a few minutes."

Exactly the same applies to the question of costs. As one of the contributors above mentioned, judges think nothing of wasting our time with some pointless trip to court or unnecessary directions, but God help you when you try to recover payment for such work - "No, no, clearly disproportionate". Again, they have not the faintest idea of the economics of a solicitor's practice, and the proposed spell in an office would do them (and us) a great deal of good.

They also seem to share a rather touching but hopelessly naive belief in the powers of technology. No doubt it is very useful in the multi-million pound cases that they're trying, where the parties can throw hundreds of thousands of pounds at the case, but it's rather less relevant in the sort of cases described by Dominic Cooper, which are much more typical of everyday civil litigation.

Maybe some of these senior judges should be forced to try a few cases involving some typical LIP's, with carrier bags full of irrelevant and disordered documents, `authorities' printed off from some US website and an obsessive belief in their hopeless case. Perhaps then they might just realise and, who knows, even be a bit grateful for the massive amount of work we contemptible `lawyers' actually save His Lordship and his chums.