You only have to ask a partner whose firm has just been booted off some panel or other to find out how quickly that sacred bond between client and adviser can be severed. When the occasion demands, therefore, lawyers can call upon hitherto unprecedented reserves of patience and tact to avoid committing an embarrassing faux pas in front of those beloved meal-tickets, sorry, clients.
One City disputes partner tells how a friendly game of football with the bean-counters extraordinaire at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) – a sometime client of the firm – quickly degenerated into on-field thuggery, as one bloodthirsty player on the PwC team unleashed a succession of bone-crunching reducers and ligament-snapping slide-tackles on opponents of both sexes.
