The iconic images of Lehman Brothers' collapse will have been all too familiar to victims of the decade's other large corporate failure.

Employees leaving the office carrying cardboard boxes, traders shouting into telephones and millionaire chief executives being hauled before the US Congress to be rebuked like wayward children were all scenes played out in replica eight years ago when energy giant Enron unexpectedly imploded.

The bigger they come...

Both were US companies deemed too big to fail, both sent shockwaves through the global financial system and both were, at the time, the largest corporate collapses in history.

But the similarities do not end there. Behind closed doors the same elite group of lawyers and accountants were called in to unwind the UK businesses of both Enron and Lehman.

Linklaters and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) first teamed up in 2001 for the insolvency of Enron. It was a job so massive that eight years on the legal work has still not been resolved.

Now, precisely the same individuals - restructuring partners Tony Bugg and Richard Holden for Linklaters and Tony Lomas and Steven Pearson at PwC - have been reunited to work on an even bigger insolvency - that of US investment bank Lehman.

"We know each other very well," says Bugg. "That makes a very complicated, difficult job much more manageable."

The same, but different

Bugg maintains that there are significant differences between the two mandates, not least in terms of scale. Enron at its height required some 15 partners from the restructuring, corporate, employment and tax departments. Lehman is using at least double that.

However, there are enough similarities to suggest that Linklaters' role in the Enron administration pushed the firm up the pecking order when it came to securing the Lehman mandate.

"There hadn't really been an insolvency that big before Enron," says an in-house lawyer who used to work for Enron in the UK. "That gave Linklaters a very good springboard to act on other enormous insolvencies going forward."

Indeed, there is little doubt as to which firm is at the top of the insolvency tree. But back in 2001 it was far from certain that Linklaters would be instructed by the administrators of Enron.

The firm did already have a relationship with the company in the UK, particularly for finance and energy trading regulatory work.