The human cost of sensible strategic decisions has dominated the headlines on Legal Week during the past seven days. From redundancies to partner culls and office closures, UK law firms have been making some difficult calls on their future strategy.

Freshfields has once again been streamlining its finance offering, shedding its City aviation finance team amid a wider shakeup of the practice that is expected to result in a number of partner exits.

Berwin Leighton Paisner, meanwhile, has reached a similar conclusion about its intellectual property practice, pulling out of trademark work with a nine-strong team moving to Bristows.

And while CMS's merger with Olswang and Nabarro may yet prove to be transformational for the firms, yesterday the trio announced that 300 UK support staff – roughly a third of total numbers – will be made redundant as the firms eliminate duplication ahead of their union.

In an ominous sign of worse potentially still to come, even before the reality of Brexit is felt, Legal Week yesterday revealed that Deutsche Bank wants to stop paying panel firms for their most junior lawyers – marking the first major instance on this side of the Atlantic of a practice that has become commonplace in the US since the financial crisis.