Macfarlanes (London)

Our view...

Macfarlanes is one of the best mid-sized law firms in the city, with a corporate department that has advised on some of the year's biggest deals. The quite staggering profits its equity partners take home - a whopping £1.1million in 2007/08 – puts them in the same sort of bracket as their counterparts in the Magic Circle.

One of the reasons for this is that Macfarlanes keeps a tight lid on the equity - the firm only has 72 partners. It also eschews costly foreign offices in favour of a referral network. To this extent the firm is very much a miniature Slaughter and May, which of course means that assistants can expect to be similarly Slaughtered by the hours. Still, at least they earn the same sort of cash, and the work is some of the best in the City. Or at least it was. The firms two big revenue creating departments, corporate and real estate have inevitably seen a downturn in the last few months. Deal activity was down, but the firm has so far managed to maintain its turnover and its looking like profits won’t be hit too hard. With these guys, thankfully it’s the quality rather than the quantity of deals that has and should continue to make them profitable.

The firm was also up against Herbies and Slaughters representing CSN in its takeover bid of steel group Corus in 2007. And in 2008 it advised Pernod Ricard on its £4.5bn acquisition of Vin & Sprit.

Like Slaughters, Macfarlanes has a reputation for being a fairly old-school outfit. The partners deny this, and certainly the firm has taken recent steps towards showing its progressive, funky side - in the past corporate assistants have been invited on free skiing trips, and a bunch of assistants were packed off to the Cannes film festival back in 2005. But then again, apparently they were all issued with instructions as to what they could and couldn't say, and given strict orders to speak only when spoken to...

So maybe it's the law firm equivalent of your father trying to dance at the school disco. But the lawyers we've met all seem like a very nice bunch, and since senior partners are on well over a million a year we imagine they quite frankly couldn't care less.

The firm has also recently announced its strategy to stop focusing on hiring partners from other firms and concentrate on developing talent internally. So aside from the money and the partnership prospects, there are other clear advantages to training and working at Macfarlanes over and above the larger City practices: chiefly, its small size means that you can expect proper, hands on experience from the day you start. And whilst it's generally referred to as a corporate boutique, it also has a cracking private client department if that's your bag - a rarity in such a profitable firm.

The downside is that there's nowhere to hide - if you're crap you'll be found out in double quick time - and given the lack of foreign offices it's not the best place to go if you fancy heading off to the Med for a little R&R.

Another complaint is the building and its décor. “It is a firm that is constantly cutting costs so everything is a tad on the old side of new and the offices, IT systems, ancient dictaphones etc could do with being modernised a bit,” says one associate.

Clearly this is one of the top firms at which to work, and as long as you're happy with tough hours and have the intellectual ability to cope with early responsibility it's an obvious choice. Along with Travers Smith (same work, slightly less crusty), in our opinion the best mid-sized firm in the City.

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