Final Word on BrE/LylE "Fee Earner"

Further research convinces me that the following is the truth of the matter:
In BrE law firms, there is a middle rank of persons who are not qualified solicitors but who perform duties that are other than purely secretarial (in the modern sense). Some of these persons may have their duties billed out to clients of the law firm. If so, they become "fee earners" by definition. If no bill is ever sent to a client for work purportedly done by such a person, that person is, by definition, not (yet) a "fee earner".

A "fee earner" could also be called a paralegal. But some paralegals are not "fee earners". It depends on whether the services purportedly performed by the paralegal are billed to a client in which case the paralegal is both paralegal and "fee earner". There may be some BrE tendency to regard "fee earner" as a more exalted position than "mere paralegal", so there may be some tendency for "fee earner" paralegals to call themselves "fee earners" rather than or instead of "paralegals".

It does not seem that any qualified solicitor would ever call himself a "fee earner" except in a highly specialized context in which "fee earner" would be used to describe any professional staff of a law firm from solicitors on down to service-billing paralegals.
A "legal executive" seems to be a "fee earner", at least ordinarily, and is largely indistinguishable from a paralegal except in that there's some professional self-regulation going on. A legal executive can probably command a somewhat higher salary, on average, than a "mere fee earner" or a "mere fee earner who cannot hold himself out as a legal executive". In AmE the corresonding positions will almost always be "paralegals", except in a few rare situations which I can go into if anyone's interested.

In any case, it seems that no solicitor in his right mind would ever call himself a "fee earner" since it implies lower status and lower salary command (unless of course one is speaking of all professional staff of the law firm as "fee earners"). I'm guessing that much of the reason why the term "fee earner" is used as it is at all is that there are people not qualified as "legal executives" (perhaps a vanishing profession, a product of early postwar experimentation?) who want some sort of nice-sounding title for themselves to distinguish them from the riff-raff below them.

Also, "fee earner" seems to be similarly used in Subsidiary BrE-Tradition cultures, like AusE.