With Londoners striving to get back to normal after the recent terrorist attacks in the capital, it was reassuring to note that it takes more than a bomb scare to ruffle the feathers of the unflappable folk at Herbert Smith.

The City firm's Exchange House fortress was itself the subject of a recent security alert – not that the notoriously stiff upper lips of Messrs Gold, Fleck and company quivered for so much as a moment.

On the advice of police, staff were instructed to lower all the blinds during the alert to prevent passers by being showered with glass in the event of an explosion – and categorically not, as one Herbies associate suggested to your Diarist, "in case a bomb went off and blew the papers about".