As you may have noticed, there was a summit of global leaders in London this week. Cue chants of ‘shame on you!’ (and worse) outside the Bank of England.

The bank is the wrong venue for the protesters. They should have taken the Docklands Light Railway over to Canary Wharf instead and camped out by the Financial Services Authority. After all, it is the regulator rather than the Bank of England that shoulders the blame for the banking failures.

But who was keeping an eye on these banks’ legal advisers?

Nick Smedley’s recently published report, commissioned by the Law Society, found serious shortcomings in the regulation of corporate law firms by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. These are the same firms that advised the banks.

There exists, therefore, a small chance that should a corporate firm in some way be implicated in the crisis, the floodgates of public fury that opened against the FSA could also open against the legal profession’s own regulator.

True, there are only limited similarities to be drawn between the FSA and the SRA as regulators. However, this is a complex crisis, and public sentiment is not necessarily determined by logical argument. A perception that the lawyers who advised the banks were running amok in the City while the SRA shut down a few conveyancers in Wales would be an extremely damaging one.

Smedley agreed with this point to some extent after I put it to him yesterday: ‘At the moment you can’t argue that there is effective regulation of corporate law firms,’ he said. ‘Nobody is managing the risk they present.’

It is only a small chance, which hopefully won’t come back to bite. And in any case, I doubt the protesters will divert their march to SRA HQ in Redditch.