For those rare folk who do not see advising big companies on how best to wring cash from one another as the very apex of human endeavour, it might seem strange that someone who was not a business lawyer should ever want to pose as one.

Correspondingly, partners at Dorsey & Whitney were more than a little surprised to discover last month that one of their junior associates was rather more junior than they had imagined. In fact, the individual in question was not even a lawyer at all.