It’s far from clear how the legal landscape will look when the dust settles from the regulatory big bang. But we may well need a new toolkit of metaphors to talk about it. In Obiter’s opinion the collection in current circulation has lost its mojo, passed its sell-by date and, frankly, no longer does what it says on the tin.

Take the breathless language in Espirito Santo Investment Bank’s report - The Legal Services Market: The Race is On (see p14). The title page gallops off into a nice horse-racing metaphor. But come page three we’re switching metaphors faster than Murray Walker when the commentary box catches fire. Apparently there’s a perfect storm brewing, prompting a ‘seismic re-appraisal of LLP partnership strategies’. Meanwhile externalisation will initiate a land-grab - though beware the risk of it backfiring.

Already, it seems, the barometer is shifting.

‘The tremors have started at the bottom end, creating jitters among the smallest firms nearest the quake… With the introduction of ABSs, those jitters will be magnified and create a domino effect as they cascade through the market.’

But before you run from the shaking cliche of your office building straight into all that busy high street traffic, take a moment to consider Professor Stephen Mayson’s sage advice quietly slipped in at the end of the foreword: ‘Fortune will favour the brave’.