BRIEF BUT SWEET
When a lawyer is called out of his own circuit to plead for plaintiff or defendant in another, he is described as “u specially engaged,” and receives a large fee or honorarium accordingly, generally from one to five hundred pounds sterling. Perhaps the largest fee ever received in England was by Lord Truro (then Sir Thomas Wilde), who had nine thousand guineas for going out of his circuit to plead in some great property case. His brief, so called like lucus a non lucendo, because of the prolixity of such documents-extended to over two thousand pages.
