Obiter must confess to occasional musings over what might have been if only things had turned out slightly differently. Be honest – who doesn’t?

Consider this then: but for a small tweak of fate your law firm might have had singer and actress Jennifer Lopez on the staff. As Lopez told this week’s Big Issue in the ‘Letter to my younger self’ column: ‘When I left high school and practicalities took over, I thought I’d maybe be a lawyer, because I worked in a law office and really enjoyed it.’ A little crushing to know, then, that she still believes that she was ‘right to follow her heart’.

But was that really the end of J-Lo’s love of the law? A rifle through Obiter’s extensive collection of her albums indicates not. Lyrics from this year’s song On the Floor [of the Central Criminal Court?] point to the lively courtroom style that could have characterised her advocacy – ‘Baby it’s the truth’, ‘I play with your brain’, and the more direct ‘If you’re a criminal kill it on the floor’.

Another song, To Love Is Forever, surely reveals an admirable whistleblowing tendency in the line ‘I can’t keep quiet anymore’.

And might not the lyrics ‘charge me up baby charge me up once and again’ refer to contingency or conditional fee agreements, or indeed just an overall billing strategy?

As lawyers ponder their loss, it’s nice that Lopez is still happy to scatter a little stardust on the legal profession from afar.