THE law of the jungle has permeated barristers� chambers and solicitors� offices, if shocking tales of sexual shenanigans are to be believed.
The casting couch, once the bane of the film world, is now the standard furniture of the legal profession, according to a young City lawyer who has written an explicit novel about life inside a leading law firm.
Briefs, once dry and dusty case documents prepared for silks by solicitors, are now just as likely to be silky undergarments belonging to female trainees obliged to discard them by lascivious partners on salaries beyond the dreams of avarice.
The affairs, bullying and binge-drinking exposed by Alex Gilmore, the nom de plume of the author of Fish Sunday Thinking, are scandalising the profession.
He depicts a world in which young women are ranked by the size of their breasts rather than their legal acumen, in which sex is a commodity designed to advance careers, and in which a large proportion of workaholic young lawyers blow their pay packets on alcohol. The hunt is now on to identify the 27-year-old author and the firm for which he used to work before switching to a practice in the Midlands.