ABSTRACT
While on a summer clerkship with a large and well-respected commercial firm, you are (naturally) concerned to make a good impression. It is your second last year of law school and you are desperate for Articles. The partner supervising you decides to give you some of her files to get ready for ‘costing’. She asks you to total the number of hours which she has spent on each file and, from her harried expression, it is pretty clear that she is concerned to charge out a significant amount on each file. She asks you to ‘round up’ her hours to the next hundred in each file, saying that, on average, clients are happy because the main thing they demand is quality work. You know that these clients are entirely satisfied with the firm and that your supervisor is not about to debate the issue with you. Would you round up the hours as requested? (Evans and Palermo 2005: 113).
