In some quarters, fending off a high profile raid on two of your top rainmakers would be viewed as a draw if not an outright win. Unfortunately for Clifford Chance (CC), London’s gossip-fuelled legal market is a tough audience to please.

So for corporate lawyers, the spectacle of Weil Gotshal & Manges coming within a whisker of securing the services of Matthew Layton and James Baird, widely regarded as the twin engines of CC’s much-vaunted private equity practice, is judged as highly unsettling.