“If I was David I would have said I’d had a f***ing terrible year.” With William Charnley last week taking the total number of partners to quit McDermott Will & Emery’s City arm to 11 in little more than a year, there are no prizes for guessing which US firm’s London managing partner a rival was describing above.

Less than a decade after one of the most high-profile London debuts by a foreign firm, from the outside it all seems to have gone more than a little bit wrong for McDermott.