When one looks at her last year, it’s no surprise that peers consider Anna Worwood one of the brightest family lawyers in London. A leading authority on relocation, she has worked on a slew of reported cases, including Re C (in which the Court of Appeal ruled that local migration disputes have equal gravity to inter-jurisdictional ones) and Re D (in which she represented the mother).

‘The fall in the value of the pound has thrown up some interesting issues,’ says Nicholas Westley. One of his recent cases involves a UK-US couple who separated two years ago, splitting their British property equally, resulting in £3-4 million for the wife and its equivalent in dollars for his client. But the sterling crash has made the husband’s US assets worth around £2 million more.

‘You get Magic Circle quality service, you get our brains, but without the ginormous price tag of our competitors,’ Joe Vaitilingam tells Spear’s when asked to detail his firm’s offering.

Raymond Tooth is a celebrity, whose hard-fought battles (including on behalf of the wives of Jude Law, Eric Clapton and Colin Montgomerie) have earned him the moniker ‘Jaws’. If Spear’s is inclined to wonder whether age has mellowed him, the thought is dispelled on witnessing his vigour as he dashes across the path of a car in Mayfair: ‘Nothing can kill me,’ he declares. ‘I’m Ray Tooth.’

‘A solid, old-school lawyer,’ one family head of a competitor firm tells Spear’s in commending Erica Shelton. The Bloomsbury-born partner is known for ‘litigating effectively when required with patience and pragmatism’, and she certainly gets results. For instance, she recently won £10.5 million for the wife of Sir Terence Conran in a landmark case where the non-financial contribution to a marriage was taken into account for the first time.