Mr Justice Edwin Johnson agreed to Pump Court’s request for anonymity to avoid Goodfield being tipped off and disposing of her assets.

However, Goodfield immediately confessed and accepted a freezing injunction without argument. She produced an affidavit at the subsequent hearing in which she “candidly admitted to her wrongdoing” and said “she had indeed taken the money and now bitterly regretted it”.

Goodfield showed “no little signs of distress” at the hearing and “could not quite come to terms with the scale of her wrongdoing which she could now so very clearly see”, said Deputy Judge Charles Morrison.

Yet despite Goodfield’s admission, Pump Court argued that the anonymity order should be extended.

It explained that a small team was dealing with the alleged fraud and having to tackle the publicity as well would make things “all the worse”.

Past members also hadn’t yet been informed, said the set, and it wasn’t known if the fraud might impact them.

Most importantly, allowing the matter to become public might cause “a run on the bank”, triggering “a spiral of decline” in which all its high-earning barristers would decide “that they should not be last to leave”, suggested the chambers.

Morrison didn’t think much of Pump Court’s submissions. He said the publicity “may indeed be an inconvenience, perhaps even a severe distraction. But is that a good reason to depart from the principle of open justice? I have to say I don’t think that it is”.

He also did not “find it easy” to agree that “sophisticated members of a respected chambers” would “feel it necessary to seek to practise elsewhere when it was patent that their management colleagues were doing their utmost to recover the proceeds of an alleged fraud”. In any event, the point of the anonymity order was to prevent Goodfield being tipped off, and that had been achieved.

Other briefs expressed their shock at the fraud. Gatehouse Law barrister Faisel Sadiq said he was sorry for his peers at Pump Court who “have been betrayed by someone you trusted”, although he also thought that seeking the continuation of the anonymity order was “very unusual”.

It’s not known how much cash Pump Court will recover. Judge Morrison said that Goodfield “appeared to be saying that all of the money taken by her had been spent on her lifestyle”, equating to a healthy spend of £700,000 a year.