With so many City standards clearly slipping, it was a little incongruous to note last week that the Neolithic attitudes to women prevalent in some sections of the legal profession remain firmly in place.

Scanning the wares at a recent IT trade show, in a vain search for an Xbox 360, The Diary feared for a moment that it had been mistakenly cast in a Robert Palmer video as numerous ‘young lovelies’ tottered out from their booths in cocktail dresses and stilettos in a bid to make digital dictation seem sexy.