Poetry is seldom far away at legal leviathan Eversheds, where the air is thick with the heady aroma of rhyme and whimsy.

Chief executive David Gray is the firm’s resident bard and is well-known for his uncanny knack of knocking out a quick ode on anything ranging from the firm’s latest star lateral hire to a 40-quid outsourcing contract to clean the firm’s chicken-soup dispensers. (Whether he was the author of that crude limerick about a real estate partner The Diary saw on the wall of the fourth-floor gents’ is open to question, however.)