Abstract. Nonreflexive Banach spaces that are complemented in their bidual by an L-projection-like preduals of von Neumann algebras or the Hardy space H 1 -contain, roughly speaking, many copies of l 1 which are very close to isometric copies. Such l 1 -copies are known to fail the fixed point property. Similar dual results hold for c 0 .In [4] it is shown that an isomorphic l 1 -copy does not necessarily contain asymptotically isometric l 1 -copies although by James' classical distortion theorem it always contains almost isomorphic In the present note we modify a construction of Godefroy in order to show that every nonreflexive subspace of any L-embedded Banach space contains an asymptotic l 1 -copy and thus, in particular, fails the fixed point property. Analogous results hold for c 0 and M-embedded spaces.Let (x n ) be a sequence of nonzero elements in a Banach space X. We say that (x n ) spans l 1 r-isomorphically or just isomorphically if there existsTrivially the property of spanning l 1 almost isometrically passes to subsequences. Analogously, we say that (x n ) spans c 0 almost isometrically if there exists a sequence (δ m ) as above such that (1 − δ m ) sup m≤n≤m |α n | ≤ m n=m α n x n ≤ (1 + δ m ) sup m≤n≤m |α n | for all m ≤ m .