There's nothing like a bit of lawyer-bashing to get the grey matter engaged, at least when I'm not feeling that inspired. So today my attention turned to a spot of legal battery in an entertaining column from Luke Johnson, head of Risk Capital Partners and all-round business pundit (not without reason, he writes well).

Under the headline 'Lawyers are above the law of decency', Johnson recounts the story of a deal he was involved in for which a law firm quoted £35,000, only to announce two days before completion that the bill would actually be £110,000. Understandably irritated, Johnson writes: "It baffles me how they can have the impertinence to call themselves professionals. Such behaviour makes cowboy builders look like choirboys. No other supplier of any other service would even dare to behave in such an egregious and cavalier manner."

Great knock-about stuff, but Johnson doesn't stop there, going on to argue that a "blame culture and a pervasive sense of entitlement" has encouraged socially useless lawyering. He also argues the legal profession is a "huge drain on wealth creation", "the West is over-lawyered" and that "all those manipulative lawyers should do something more creative, like start a manufacturing business". There are also cracks about billing rates outstripping inflation in recent years. Asks Johnson: "On what planet is a senior partner worth more than 100 times the minimum wage?"

Case closed? Well, anyone expecting me to mount a heartfelt defence of the profession will be disappointed. On billing practices Johnson is basically right. The kind of incident he outlines on the deal completion is not remotely unusual and underscores a complacent culture on costs and value. Likewise, it is inarguable that rising profitability largely came from above-inflation rises in billing rates over the last 15 years; the economics of law firms don't encourage a focus on value or efficiency. But it's a much bigger stretch to condemn the profession on this basis. It's largely down to buyers to beware and I'm not aware of any industry in which the sellers don't charge as much as they can get away with.

On the broader, er, broadside, the attack loses most of its focus. The stuff about draining wealth creation and blame culture is entirely correct – if you live in the US. But America's mania for settling business issues through the courts is almost entirely exceptional. Litigation is far less prevalent and is either stable or falling in most other developed countries.

He is also on shaky ground criticising lawyer earnings. Executive pay has soared for the last 20 years out of all proportion to the performance of the underlying businesses. Income Data Services recently concluded that chief executives of the UK's 100 largest companies will have earned 81 times the average pay of full-time workers in 2009, up from 47 times the average wage just nine years earlier. In many cases the link between incentive and performance is at best weak at public companies, and I hardly think the banking profession or buyout community is in any position to lecture anyone on what constitutes fair comp. A real strength of the law firm model is that partner remuneration is directly tied to the health of the underlying business – the general state of wealth creation would be in much better shape if that was case at more companies.

As to the claim about doing something more useful, I tend to think any industry or businessman is on a sticky wicket when they start claiming that their own line of work has more value that someone else's. The UK legal profession generates more than £20bn annually, pays more taxes than many corporations due to the partnership structure and is one of the few industries in which this country can claim to be a world leader. I can think of worse ways to make a buck and if the West is "over-lawyered" the market can take care of it in the long run.

Are lawyers more greedy than they were 20 years ago? Almost certainly. But then what industry would that not be true of? Two decades of free-market liberalisation and right-wing shift in Western political thinking has had its impact. 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.