Nabarro (London)

Our view...

Nabarro is a bigger firm than you might think: it now has over a hundred partners, each of whom made an average profit of £525,000 last year. And it has a reputation for promoting from within wherever possible, so the chances for ambitious assistants are as good as they get for this sort of firm.

The firm has also made some aggressive lateral hires, tempting partners or assistants from such firms as Ashurst, Pinsent Masons, DLA Piper and Addleshaw Goddard. but to an extent, however, these merely served to compensate for the number of departures from the firm over the previous couple of years. In particular, Nabarro lost a high number of property lawyers to US firms, and an assistant notes that the highly rated pensions group lost "3 partners and 9 assistants in 18 months". Critics claim this pointed to concerns about the firm's strategy, but the firm claims that the problem has now resolved itself - and that strategy has certainly shifted.

The firm's gold standard has always been its property department which is extremely strong (recent deals of note include advising Paddington Development Corporation on around £500million of office, retail and residential space and Land Securities on a number of deals: including the redevelopment of Allen & Overy's old offices). Over the last couple of years, however, it has made no secret of its desire to be seen as more of a corporate firm, choosing its first senior partner from the corporate department, seeing its private client team move on to other firms and announcing that it aims to be "the top commercial law firm serving the UK mid-market".

Of course, it's not the only one trying to do that. But it seems to be making a decent stab of it. In 2006/2007 the firm's corporate group advised on 21 AIM flotations, up from 15 the previous year, and won 14 new M&A clients. OK, that was in a boom market, but it's a decent start.

The refocusing has certainly caused some internal unhappiness with complaints that successful departments are being squeezed to fund the corporate lawyers.  Still, a substantial increase in profits suggest that the strategy may be bearing fruit. As far as individual remuneration is concerned, pay is reasonable (given that the hours fall short of the top tier) and a new "Individual Merit" scheme has been introduced. This applies to all staff and is awarded for "client care and business development, knowledge development and innovation, training and development of people and performance delivery". So whoever the partnership like the look of, then.

The firm has no formal flexible working policy, but they claim to "consider requests for such arrangements on a case-by-case basis". And given that arrangements have been made with 150 staff so far, it's clearly more than just talk.

On the negative side, those looking for experience overseas will be underwhelmed by Nabarro's list of out-of-London offices: Brussels and... err... Sheffield. Still at least the London offices are nice - they even won an award for them.

For more information on recruitment at Nabarro click here