Obiter has always lived by the maxim ‘be nice to your human resources people, for when the chopping starts, it is they who will be wielding the axe.’ But perhaps such thinking is for losers and wimps.

Certainly David Childs, managing partner at magic circle firm Clifford Chance, shows no inhibitions about offending his firm’s human resources department, if some remarks last week are any guide.

‘I never understand HR professionals,’ he told the Global Managing Partners Summit. ‘I used to come out of meetings with them with no idea of what they were saying. They speak in jargon, but there either was no message, or it was very simple. I don’t have HR professionals reporting to me because we’re on a different planet.’

Ouch. Nevertheless, and with a good dose of cheek, a member of the audience decided to put Childs’s concerns to Tim Cole, a former HR director at magic circle firm Freshfields. ‘I don’t care whom I report to,’ he shot back in admirably plain English. ‘The mindset should be that the HR professional works for the firm, not for the partners, although they do need to report through to someone in management.’

Childs wasn’t the only top dog making a little mischief at the summit. One general counsel of a major corporation, speaking under the Chatham House rule, revealed a ‘little game’ he likes to play to ginger up the law firms on his panel. When handing out chunks of work, he likes to invite lawyers from competing firms into the same room and watch how they interact. ‘It’s daggers drawn,’ he said – admitting the process, like herding cats, is mainly for his own entertainment. Obiter assumes that the daggers in question are metaphorical, but in the current climate you never know.