Whitewater rafting in the great outdoorsLaw firms are facing stiff competition for the recruitment of talented young lawyers, as any legal recruiter will tell you.

Lawyers with glamorous in-house positions, share options and corporate benefits packages, have lost the stigma of being 'poor relations' to their private practice counterparts.

Obiter wonders what clinched the deal for fun-loving 33-year-old Riccardo Nardi, whitewater rafting with a motley crew of travel industry figures, in Australia's Queensland.

Obiter is assured that Mr Nardi, head of legal services and company secretary of the Association of British Travel Agents, also swam with sharks and raced quad bikes as reported earlier this month (see [2000] Gazette, 8 June 2000), although photographic evidence failed to materialise.

Mr Nardi was not available for a comment on the photograph, but a man closely resembling him was spotted on the Brighton express.

It is understood he was planning to celebrate the heatwave with an ice cream and a bungee jump off the pier.