Given the unusual structure that regional firm Bevan Ashford adopted - with two separate networks of offices - it is perhaps no great surprise that the partners have now decided to take the next step and completely demerge.

This is not an isolated example.

In the past couple of years, the likes of DJ Freeman, Hugh James Ford Simey, Jacksons, Whittles, Fishburn Morgan Cole, Leigh Day & Co, and Bolt Burden have done likewise.

In addition, niche practices have split from larger firms, and branch offices have gone their own ways.

The reasons for such decisions are varied, but there is a trend for defendant insurance practices to find their business models so different from that of other commercial lawyers that there is little point in having them in the same firms.

The broader issue is the gradual polarisation of the profession and the squeeze on the mid-sized generalist commercial firms that grew up in the 1980s.

Those firms can now no longer be all things to all clients.

The big are getting bigger, able to offer a complete service, and the small are getting more niche, with lower overheads and charge-out rates.

There has to be a place in the middle for some, but perhaps not as many as currently occupy that ground.

One would not still sport the shoulder pads and perms of the 1980s; a strategy born of the same era is equally out of fashion.