Sometimes, just sometimes, you have to have pity for the armies of marketing, branding and PR bods that the big commercial firms employ in a bid to get their messages across. The reason for Obiter's sudden - and unlikely - outpouring of sympathy is that if there is one newspaper in the whole world in which law firms would give their right arm to get a mention, it would be the Financial Times. But now comes evidence that this grail may not be so holy after all. Last week, the pink'un's influential 'Lex' column decided to get stuck into the meaty subject of so-called Tesco Law. 'Few law firms, presumably, would relish being owned by a grocer but in the UK that prospect is drawing closer,' it intoned, before indulging in a bit of crystal ball-gazing about who might buy what. Showing it has perhaps more in common with Lex Luthor than its Latin meaning, it carried on: 'Outsourcing groups like Capita and Serco would surely be interested in bulk conveyancing practices such as Eversheds and Hammonds.' Oh dear - all those efforts to convince people you can take on everyone, even the might of the magic circle, only to be damned with a stroke of a journalist's pen as a mere bulk conveyancer. Whether Eversheds will be quite so keen to maintain its prominent Web site link to the FT's news pages must surely now be open to question.