Many corporate lawyers will have had a snigger at the misfortune faced by Photobition and its advisers, including Pritchard Englefield, during the printing company's on-going £83m hostile bid for digital imaging company Wace.
Photobition first had to tell shareholders that the code names – so beloved of financial advisers and others – for the two companies, 'Pyrotechnic' and 'Wild', had, because of printing problems, been mistakenly included in parts of the offer document. The takeover panel then told the company to issue a five-page correction to clarify graphs in the offer document.
But given the ever-increasing size and complexity of these documents and the time pressures involved in bids, those same corporate lawyers will be thinking 'There but for the grace of God, go I'.

Dentons' diplomacy pays off
One of the reasons behind Denton Hall's decision to pull out of its tripartite talks with Richards Butler (RB) and Theodore Goddard (TG) last October was the uncertain post-merger fate of the French firm in its Denton International network, Sales Vincent.
Casting Sales Vincent off because RB already had a Paris office and TG had its own links with Klein Goddard, another Paris firm, would have sent the wrong signal to the remaining five European firms in Denton International, a network in which the firm has invested a great deal of time and effort.
Dentons' decision looks to have been vindicated, judging by the international reach required to advise The Associates, the US finance company, on the UK and European law aspects of its $3.9bn purchase of Avco Financial Services (see Deals, page 34). With many senior partners scrambling around Europe this year in a bid to link up with the reducing number of quality firms available, Dentons may be a step ahead.

Turbulent time for buy-out sector
After an uncomfortable few months before Christmas, buy-out lawyers at the leading buy-out firms are optimistic about the year ahead. The work looks as if it will be there – but should buy-out specialists be worrying about growing competition?
There are relatively few clients active in this field, everybody knows each other and, so the theory goes, it would be very difficult for an outsider to muscle in on the act.
Of course, there was one major development last year – Stephen Mostyn-Williams' defection from Ashurst Morris Crisp to Shearman & Sterling with three other partners. Was his defection the exception that proves the rule? Or do the top UK buy-out firms – especially those lacking international reach – face a more uncertain future?
There is anecdotal evidence that the firms themselves are preparing themselves for greater competition. A well-regarded partner at a leading firm has admitted to Legal Week that he has been approached by three other firms recently, all of them from among the top five UK firms. Behind a veneer of stability, it would seem, things are hotting up in the buy-out sector.
M&A table: a marathon or a sprint?
Last week's mergers and acquisitions tables gave the corporate departments at Eversheds, Wragge & Co and Pinsent Curtis the public recognition that their hard work over 1998 justified.
But if you look back over the last five years, the three firms and their regional and national rivals have struggled to establish consistency in the total value of the deals that they have acted on. According to Acquisition Monthly's statistics, the M&A department of Birmingham's Wragge & Co has performed the most consistently, appearing three times in the top 20.
Joint second are the teams at Hammond Suddards and Eversheds which both appeared twice. And third place with one appearance each goes to Pinsent Curtis and Dibb Lupton Alsop.
If consistency, as the old saying goes, is a virtue, then these firms need to appeal to a more diverse selection of clients to allow for fluctuations in sector activity. Such a move would help to keep the department's fee income steady.