It has been revealed that around 26 members of staff have left Schillings over the last 14 months. Given that the firm employs just 45 people, that's over half its entire payroll. Ouch.

The news follows the firm's efforts to reinvent itself. Schillings used to make its money by charging stupid rich people enormous sums in return for keeping their misbehaviour private. But things went badly wrong after the firm obtained a super-injunction on behalf of footballer Ryan Giggs, who didn't want anyone to find out he was shagging his sister-in-law. Despite coughing up a rumoured half a million pounds the entire world soon knew all about it: fans chanted "you're not secret anymore" on the terraces, and newspapers in Scotland published his name with impunity. Schillings only gave up when Giggs was named in parliament.
 
    Ryan Giggs playing football and not having sex with his sister-in-law

Following the debacle the firm's star partner Gideon Benaim, who had acted for Giggs, jumped ship. And so Schillings told its new trainees not to turn up, cancelled its grad rec programme and morphed from a boring old law firm into what it now calls a 'reputation and privacy consultancy'.

To be fair the strategy seems to be working, with turnover up 30% last year. But 26 departures still represents a massive churn rate. A spokesman claimed that the figure isn't all it seems as five or six staff had moved into new contract roles. He said that overall headcount remains the same, and it's just the firm is now recruiting into areas such as data protection and family law, instead of whatever they called the department which burnt celebrities' stained bedsheets and sent cookies to Justice Eady.
 
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