As law firm collapses go, Cobbetts has neither the partner infighting of Halliwells nor the sheer scale and alleged top-level mismanagement of Dewey & LeBoeuf to generate popular appeal.

What Cobbetts does provide, though – far more so than the more extreme examples above – is a salient lesson to all law firms about how quickly and easily things can go wrong in today's ever-uncertain economic climate.

Of course, like Halliwells, much of the problem for Cobbetts lay with some bold property decisions that would ultimately destroy it – at £74m, Cobbetts' lease liabilities made up more than 80% of its total liabilities at the time of its collapse.

But as numerous firms can testify, it is an easy mistake to make. After all, not everyone gets as lucky as Norton Rose believes it did on its More London deal. As such, there are plenty of examples out there of firms signing new office deals at the wrong point in the market and then going on to struggle to sub-let an ever-increasing amount of unwanted space.

Similarly, Cobbetts is not alone in failing to predict how long the impact of Lehman's collapse would be felt and therefore failing to restructure its business accordingly away from transactional practices.

While many of the largest firms have taken action to bulk up in other areas such as disputes and regulatory work, there are plenty of others – particularly in the squeezed mid-tier – that would probably concede they have not yet moved far enough in this direction.

None of this is to say that Cobbetts' management team did not make mistakes, because they clearly did – including, arguably, not taking decisive enough action to control costs and borrowings, and failing to find a merger partner before the problems became insurmountable.

But in any other market, these mistakes would have been unlikely to have cost the firm its existence. Today's reality, though, means that nearly five years after Lehman's collapse caused the global markets to implode, the still brutal economic climate means there is little room for error any more. And especially not on issues as expensive as property.

In comparison to other industries, the legal market has remained relatively resilient – buoyant in some instances even, if some firms' predictions of double-digit growth for the current financial year are proved true.

But as the small – yet growing – list of law firm casualties demonstrates, it is not entirely immune from risk. And with the new world order proving less forgiving, bad decisions that firms could, in the past, have come back from may now prove fatal.