‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned,’ wrote Karl Marx, alluding to capitalism’s awesome capacity for creative destruction. In this at least he was right, as evidenced perhaps by the demise of Ashton Morton Slack, a century-old mainstay of the Sheffield legal scene.

The precise circumstances of the former top 200 firm’s administration are not yet clear. AMS had contracted sharply over the last couple of years and its latest accounts show the LLP was heavily in debt to the bank. BDO issued the usual boilerplate statement about declining workflows and rising overheads leading to insurmountable cashflow problems. It may well be as simple as that.

We’ve heard this before, of course, and in a very similar context – the collapse of Halliwells across the Pennines in Manchester, which sent shockwaves through the profession’s mid-tier. Indeed, BDO is handling that administration too, demonstrating that in professional services it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.

The most obvious conclusion of another high-profile law firm failure is that it is going to make it even harder for LLPs in particular to borrow new money and run hefty overdrafts. Emphatically so in a week when the Bank of England squarely pinned the blame for the lack of lending to small businesses on the banks themselves, and not lack of demand.