However, there is one aspect that stands out from talking to City firms, and that is the extent to which the concept of scale has become almost a bogeyman for top law firms. In particular, there is much discussion from Linklaters and Freshfields about how no one cares about size anymore. What else could explain both firms making so little of ending CC's long reign as the UK's largest law firm in revenue terms? Such sentiments are, I think, largely related to CC's colossal struggles with scale over the last decade, which, despite its best efforts, have yet to be entirely resolved. Freshfields and Linklaters, for their own part, remain scarred by their own post-merger hassles in Europe between 2002 and 2005 and have no intention of repeating past mistakes.

Scale, of course, is now also indelibly linked to huge banking practices and conjures up notions of legal teams that are high-leverage, unwieldy, bordering on the commoditised and low on rainmaking skills.

But while the concept of scale has fallen so far from favour, there's a little more to the equation than big = bad. If the magic circle (bar Slaughters) were really that anti-big, then the group was extremely careless to have grown 10-fold over the last 20 years. The bottom line is what my old history teacher used to say when asserting his requirements for assigned essays: "I don't want quantity, I want quality... and quantity."

The mid-term aim for the UK contenders for global elite status remains magic circle critical mass/white shoe profitability. Critical mass in this context - and probably for the next five years - means fee income in the ballpark of £1bn-£1.5bn. As long as that is achieved, quality takes precedence - quality of practice, quality of partnership and quality of profits. On that yardstick - their own yardstick - it has been a bloody good year for Linklaters and Freshfields. Conversely, CC doesn't need me to point out that its challenges go further than cyclical exposure to banking or one year of exceptional market conditions.

As I argued once before, these shifts in attitude have enormous implications for the legal market, and hold real opportunities for the best firms outside the magic circle. The age of consolidation as a simple, one-way process in legal services is dead. There will be much more stratification or segmentation of the market as top firms get ready to withdraw from certain practice areas. Likewise, the same firms will take flags off the map if they don't fit in with their quality ethic.

It will be interesting to see the extent to which clients recognise and support this trend. In some areas it will be bring them more value and a better service - in others, the comfort of a top brand law firm may be something they must learn to live without.

Although clients and recruitment consultants were represented, the audience was primarily made up of executives from advertising agencies, two of whom were panelists: Sue Sowerby, joint managing director at The Sowerby Group, and Stewart Goold, client services director at ThirtyThree.

The other panel members were: James O'Brien, director of private practice at LPA Legal, John Barnes, managing director, digital strategy at Incisive Media, and Tim Forster, former head of experienced recruitment at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Sharing war stories appeared to have a cathartic effect on the panel and audience - and we had a wide-ranging discussion about the state of the market and where it might be heading. Here are some of the observations that were made:

How does this recession differ from the last one?

Considerably worse is the short answer. There are two reasons for this. First, because the credit crunch has hit every sector, whereas in the early 1990s there were some patches of growth. And second, because the web didn't exist back then, making life a lot more simple.

Everybody knew 2009 was going to be bad, but what problems were hard to foresee?

Budgeting has proved very difficult. It is human nature for people in business roles to keep busy in order to justify their existence. This applies to people in HR departments. Their companies may not be recruiting, but they need to keep active. Because of this, work that was promised at the start of the year has failed to materialise, driving a coach and horses through budgets. Agencies are also having to closely the monitor the resources they plough into pitches, given the number of prospects that come to nothing.

It is often said that recessions accelerate trends. Will print recruitment advertising ever return to anything like the levels seen before the downturn?

The web is a very powerful recruitment tool, but there will always be a place for print recruitment advertising - because of the branding opportunities if offers and because with online there is often a problem about the quality of applicants. There is a value in having people actively respond to print advertising as opposed to simply clicking a button to apply for a job.

The web presents HR departments with all sorts of low cost recruitment options - won't they simply cut out the middlemen and do the advertising themselves?

The web is exciting and fast-moving, but it is also extremely difficult to predict. If anything, this increases the need for companies to seek advice from consultants. If they try and do it themselves, they may be taking a big risk.

And what about the future for publishers like Incisive Media?

The web is a very fluid medium - fads come and go with remarkable speed and it is almost impossible to predict with any certainty where it is heading. In such an environment, established and trusted media brands are extremely well placed, especially if they are fleet of foot and learn how to ride off the back of platforms like Twitter.

Finally, as the economy stabilises, what are the prospects of the market picking up quickly?

Nobody doubts that the market will start to pick up, but one factor that could slow the pace of a return to some modicum of normality are the efforts many businesses are taking to hold on to their staff while cutting back on the cost of employing them, such as unpaid leave and part-time working. As business improves, these firms can gear themselves up accordingly without a wholesale return to the recruitment market.

History teaches us certain things about attitudes to booms and busts. We know both are usually exaggerated at the time. We also know that attitudes often lag reality, especially with busts. The lag factor means people can come their most gloomy when the worst point has already past. A famous example is Bill Clinton's election pledge to fight a recession that had, it was later discovered, already ended.

You could argue this lag has happened in legal services. Several firms have told me recently that their worst trading was way back in October /November. Yet judged by the collective mood, fuelled by a wave of legal job losses, many would have assumed that February/March was the real low point.

Does that mean recovery is upon us? Well, looking at a range of indicators, it's clear the downward spiral of the UK economy has slowed considerably. It is even possible the UK, which only two months ago some pundits were fighting over to see who could come up with the most bearish forecast, has begun once again grinding out (extremely modest) growth.

This brings us to another point about attitudes to the economy - in general, the debate is often oversimplified. That was obvious two months ago when some commentators skipped, without a hint of shame, from talking of the Great Depression to Green Shoots without a beat in between.

Green shoots is a weird debate, dividing as it does the outlook into thumbs-up or thumbs-down. But you first need the economic descent to slow before you get stability, which you need before you get growth. The economy not contracting as fast as it was is plainly a good thing - you can accept that without having to bank on a strong recovery just around the corner. Most likely, that is where we are. Also handy is the banking system getting off life support, business inventories running down and a broad if minor recovery in confidence. Set against that, with a fiscal squeeze ahead of us for the next decade and below average lending for the next couple of years, it's probably going to be a slow recovery. You can argue about V or W-shaped recoveries but I heard someone put it better recently when they talked about a Nike-shaped recession - a very fast and steep contraction followed by a gradual return to growth. That also echoes what you hear from law firms. Almost no-one is saying it has gotten worse over the last couple of months; most think it has either stabilized or even turned up a little. Of course, summer trading will likely be even deader than usual as deal markets sit on their hands until September, but the difference is that now you could actually imagine something happening in September. That doesn't sound as comforting as green shoots but it's a better outlook than we had only until very recently.

Looking at Rio Tinto's recent offshore venture, I'm still struck by the willingness to send work out to companies with a comparably short-track record in legal. You can't imagine a panel review where a law firm with such a thin CV would get their foot in the door - indeed that was the rationale by many clients for not instructing smaller regional firms for low-value work when such practices first attempted to give the City elite a run for their money. Yet call yourself an LPO and apparently it's OK.

And looking at some of these deals, it's hard to see how the kind of cost savings that are being discussed can be delivered, especially as most of this stuff is at the margins. The Rio Tinto deal talks about a 20% cost saving - a multi-million figure for a major corporate that spends around £60m. I could understand that if Rio Tinto's partner, CPA Global, was fielding 50 to 100 lawyers on the project, but they are using 12. Since you could hire 12 junior associates from top-tier City firms full-time for about £2.5m a year, I can't see how this deal will generate that level of economy, initially at least.

Don't get me wrong - it would be surprising if legal process outsourcing and the like didn't become a part of global law's ecosystem and a growing one at that. But as it becomes more mainstream, some of the more airy claims being made about its benefits will be put to a sterner test.

The report, which attracted 4,020 responses, asked qualified solicitors to rate their own firms on a range of criteria. From this, LWI produced a 'core' ranking based on 11 criteria judged the most important by respondents.

To be included in the results of the research, at least 10% of a firm's associates were required to respond - and at some firms, nearly 20% of their associates took part. The theoretical maximum a firm could get if every responding associate gave it top marks for every category would be 874. In reality, any firm to score above 650 - as five firms managed - has done very well, while over 600 is OK. Scoring much below 550, however, suggests there is a problem.

What the report is not is one of those 'cuddly company to work for' surveys, which seem to proliferate these days. Though there are 'softer' criteria in the core 11 - such as work/life balance, being valued as an employee and culture  - these are balanced by 'hard' factors like salary, bonus and billable hour expectations. Others are ambition-orientated, like quality of work and prestige.

That is as it should be. Commercial law firms are places for the motivated and hard-working - there's no point in grading them like summer camp. A firm that is seen as hard-nosed can score well providing it is regarded by its own assistants as delivering quality work while also keeping to its career promises. Assistants understand if firms are tough, as long as they are consistent and fair. People do not like to sign up to a false prospectus. Reality not matching the lifestyle sales pitch is, I suspect, the main reason national and regional firms have generally not excelled.

Talking to managing partners at the individual firms brings out other themes as to what can quickly turn your assistants against you. By common consent, trainee deferrals go down like a lead balloon - not just with the deferred, but the junior ranks in general. And that goes double if you don't offer decent compensation.

The LWI findings do strongly suggest that solicitors are largely reconciled to the realities of redundancies. But what they don't like is a sense that the juniors are being disproportionately targeted, and they certainly don't like firms trying to get away with statutory payoffs. While many firms will probably get away with having averagely disgruntled and fearful workforces during the slump, it can be a risky game to play if your firm suddenly becomes an outlier. As one senior partner put it to me: "Once the perception of your law firm as a bad employer becomes student folklore, it's very hard to shift."

Firstly, the general design up been improved with a more modern look and better use of images, which contributes to a punchier homepage. Site navigation - an element we worked very hard on with legalweek.com's initial relaunch - should now be even easier as we have added additional tags making it easier to move between micro-sites such as Law Firms and Wiki. We have also added additional practice area tags like corporate finance and litigation, as you can see on this Clifford Chance story. Overall, the use of links and ability to read related material should make for an improved experience.

But while the homepage has been taken up a notch, regular readers will probably notice the greatest improvement on the sub-sections like Law Firms and In-house Lawyers, which are better organised and visually more arresting. There is also a much-improved Students section with added resources, event listings and related content. The Student site will also feature regular columnists and has its own place for graduate trainee vacancies. The recently-launched and already very popular Lawyer's Life also gets its own sub-section on the site. But most impressively of all, our team of white-coated boffins has, after months of toil, got around to adding a print function to our website. Oh, and BlackBerry addicts and gadget freaks can access the site on the simplified mobile-compliant version.

Overall, we think we have managed to genuinely improve what was already a very good site. This comes on top of other online upgrades and new ventures this year including an improved job section and daily email alert and the launch of our LinkedIn group for in-house lawyers, which has already attracted more than 600 members. But we have no intention of resting on our laurels and hope to add new features in the near future. Feedback and ideas to help with forthcoming improvements gratefully received at alex.novarese@legalweek.com.

But is that logical? After all, partner remuneration also soared during those boom times and it is obviously a major component of the rates law firms charge. Clients do sometimes resent partner earnings as well, but the issue is less pressing to them because this cost isn't directly reflected in what they are paying. To put it another way - take the example of a high-end City law firm. You pay your junior associates around £60,000 a year basic, but you expect them to bill at least three times that sum on the basis of an hourly chargeout rate of £150-£180. An equity partner at the same firm would, on average, be earning more than 10 times that salary, but the chargeout rate is in the region of £500-£600. That's only three to four times the level of the rookie.

You could argue that law firms are subsiding partners through high rates for junior associates. Why not charge out the associate at £100-£120 an hour and the partner at £1,000? That way the bill would more accurately reflect the business cost of the partner and the value of their experience and honed judgement. Leverage means the client shouldn't pay more, but resources should be better allocated. Law firms always say partners are adding value - well, why not charge for it? Likewise, clients, instead of trying to get subsided partner time, might request a more considered use of resources deciding that, actually, their matter is fine with a junior or mid-level lawyer, if the saving is that significant.

It should also, in theory, encourage value-based billing as there would be less incentive to clock up endless hours. It might also even ease the in-built tension between partners and associates with regard to their relative value to the business (on second thoughts, I don't think anything can achieve that). There are probably a dozen good reasons why it wouldn't work, but at the moment they are eluding me. Maybe readers have a view.

Lovells spends a good part of its statement stressing that the vagaries of currency movements were largely responsible for its 11% hike in revenue (actually the firm's achievement in getting 1% growth in real terms is respectable, however you look at it).

Not having quite the international exposure of Lovells to invoke, Eversheds instead opts to stress how it has "shared [the] pain" of a client base that has "suffered tremendously".

Not that you could doubt the basic truth of Lovells' claim. With international offices now accounting for nearly 60% of fee income, Lovells, along with the big four, has this year benefited from a big lift in its sterling-denominated revenue. Though it will be less extreme for most other firms, the UK top 25 as a whole will probably see in the region of 5% in extra 'growth' this year due to sharp currency movements. If you assume that revenues across the top 50 will this year be down by around 5% against 2008, in real terms the contraction will be more like 8%.

Still, it's come to something when a firm that a few years ago was criticised by some rivals for not growing its business unveils what will be one of the best-looking 2008-09 performances, only to talk down its own numbers. Eversheds, likewise, is empathising with clients' pain in a manner that will be a fixture of this year's reporting season. The assumption on the part of law firms is that their own relatively resilient profitability will be a less sensitive topic in the middle of 2010, when hopefully some form of stuttering recovery will be underway. If a law firm can find a cost to put down for 2008-09, it's going in. This is one year in which no-one wants to be too successful.

"It's incredibly difficult to define. The analogy I would draw is in The Guardian on Saturday - there is an interview with an individual and the same question is always asked: What does love look like? And there are obviously a huge range of answers. I'm not saying that this is love, but it's the same sort of relationship - it is very difficult to calibrate. You know the relationship is right when it happens. I can go through our panel and I can probably pick my top three people that I know, (individuals within the firm rather than firms themselves), who will be advising us, will be advising me in the years to come, because they get it right. To put it at its bluntest, it is about making me look good - never, ever causing any issues in terms of billing, offering to provide a secondee when they know I really need one rather than with me hawking around and getting on bended knee. It's those sort of things and just having an insight into where the department and wider group is."

If you want to read more, click here. Meanwhile, while we're on the subject of clients, Legal Week last month tried to do its bit to help in-house lawyers network with the launch of a dedicated group for employed lawyers on LinkedIn. Since then the group has attracted more than 500 members (out of 1,100 who requested membership). Obviously it's early days for us, but it's a venture we hope to build on considerably over the coming weeks. Any feedback on how the network should develop will be greatly received  - contact me by emailing alex.novarese@legalweek.com.

But you still have to strike a balance, and damaging your staff relations tends to have a shelf life that can last well into the upturn when it comes to matter much more. It will be interesting to see which firms have acquitted themselves well and, to put it bluntly, which haven't.

It will also been interesting to gauge the impact that the rapid change in economic circumstances has had on the mindset of assistants, who had become used to being assiduously courted. For a well-educated generation that until recently gave little thought to the idea that work might be scarce or that there would be a shortage of employers hoping to secure their services, it will have come as a shock.

There are also several other reasons the report promises to be particularly relevant this year. For one, the sheer number of responses, with more than 4,000 qualified solicitors below partner level taking part in the study, which means the 58 ranked law firms will have on average attracted more than 65 independent responses (firms have no role in the research process and cannot influence the outcome).

Going on the experience of previous years, many of the larger firms will attract well over 100 responses (last year DLA Piper had no less than 262). General readers will also get some scope to separate the stars from the less-than-stellar, since for the first time Legal Week will print a number of headline rankings for individual law firms. The report, which is produced by our independent research arm Legal Week Intelligence, will also this year place a stronger focus on assessing and comparing individual firms. Those firms that do well will have the distinction of being lauded by those that know them the best - their own staff.

Click here for more information on the Employee Satisfaction Survey.

Don't get me wrong, I don't doubt the size of the talent pool in India, nor that staff are a lot cheaper than in expensive cities like London. But I can't get around the fact that such initiatives have high upfront costs and cause major disruption. And all that to probably ultimately reach a lower standard of work than you had before.

None of that would be a deal-breaker if the economics of the model are stable - but are they? If, as a big City law firm, you figure it will take five years to really polish your offshoring or outsourcing services but that the ongoing cost savings would be so significant that it would be worth the time and effort, then the case is clear. But it seems that sending work to such centres is not only a hassle, it's also a short-term fix. The very factors that make countries like India attractive destinations - a fast-growing and well-educated middle class and a rapidly expanding economy - all but guarantee that the cost advantages will be dramatically eroded in a matter of years. That was obvious three years ago, but it's twice as obvious now; the UK economy is on course to contract by 4% this year, while in India it is set to grow 5%.

Barring a massive reversal of trends, in five to 10 years the relative cost advantage of basing staff in such markets versus the UK will be very different - which suggests that firms will have to up sticks again and relocate to a lower-cost market, going through the whole shooting match once more.

Which brings me to my final observation: why don't UK law firms make far more use of low-cost centres closer to home, both in the UK regions and Europe? I don't say that as some little Englander trying to protect jobs from globalisation; more that it seems a longer-term solution to the challenge of building a more competitive cost base. While there will be some of the same logistic hurdles as with offshoring, at least you know you can commit long-term without a sudden explosion in living standards making the whole thing pointless (barring some miraculous renaissance in Newcastle).

And surely there's scope for more than back-office work to go regional - much legal support and mainstream practice could be conducted from lower-cost regional offices, leaving a lean, client-facing operation in the City. I know that some City firms do use regional back offices, but the scope is generally modest. Is there any logical reason a City firm couldn't have 60% of its UK staff in the regions, with remaining 40% in the Square Mile? I'm told the model works well in investment banking. And there's no reason why effective use of regional centres couldn't be used alongside offshoring. But it seems odd to lean so heavily on Mumbai when you can't even make it to Macclesfield. But maybe I'm missing the point - I'd be genuinely interested to hear any feedback from law firms on why offshoring works for them.

Not only was Signy generally considered to be the top name in the magic circle firm's public M&A practice, but his move marks the best corporate CV to hit a US firm's London office since Mike Francies joined Weil Gotshal & Manges way back in 1998.

The fact that Signy (pictured) is CC born and raised - having spent some 22 years as a partner - only drums home the symbolism; particularly since the last time CC was in this position it managed to hold on to private equity duo James Baird and Matthew Layton, who came within a whisker of joining Weil Gotshal in 2004.

Of course, US firms have managed to recruit some UK heavyweights in finance - as Simpson Thacher did with Tony Keal. But US firms' corporate ambitions in Europe have been held back by their inability to attract the top corporate partners in the City, a highly select club of 15-20 that Signy has membership of.

That Signy - who is believed to have also held informal discussions with Debevoise & Plimpton and Sullivan & Cromwell - was disenfranchised is worrying for CC. Like many rivals, CC is in the middle of a restructuring that is expected to see more than 50 leave the partnership, a process which had certainly disconcerted Signy. And you can ignore the rumour mill - there's no truth to the scuttlebutt that Signy was among the enforced partners; CC has spent the last few weeks trying to talk him out of the Simpson Thacher move.

And aside from the general morale of CC's partnership (and there's a limit to what you can tell about morale from one departing partner, however senior) and the fact that the firm's profitability is expected to dip further than its big four rivals this year, for some the loss raises questions about CC's corporate practice.

The firm has built itself so successfully around banks, private equity houses and other forms of debt-backed institutions that flourished through the credit boom that it doesn't have the same FTSE 100 client base of its rivals. Nor does it have a rank of high-profile public M&A partners ready to fill the gap Signy will leave behind, with the obvious exception of Guy Norman.

Critics would contend that the firm should have fixed the roof while the sun was shining - ie, it should have started the notoriously long-winded process of wooing major plc clients while sponsors were still driving the practice.

Set against that it should be stressed that CC has a large corporate practice and that Signy has been less associated with marquee clients in recent years (his most regular client of late has been ailing buyout house Candover). But the firm that has built Europe's best private equity practice will now have to conclusively demonstrate that it has the up-and-coming partners to take forward its general corporate team.

In contrast, there's little risk involved for Simpson Thacher as a result of Signy's hire. The notoriously conservative New York firm has been looking to recruit for at least a year and has plenty of clients for whom Signy will be able to provide UK advice when the market does pick up.

Reading the runes, although Simpson Thacher is obviously looking for some M&A growth post-Signy, this doesn't belong to the If We Build It They Will Come school of US expansionism. Given the narrow focus of Simpson Thacher's 12-partner City arm, that's probably just as well.

CC, on the other hand, will want to get a coherent message to corporate clients - both current and prospective. General M&A takes investment and lots of patience, so there's no time to waste.

And bringing a new element to the mix, it was announced yesterday (29 April) that the US education company Apollo Group had made a preliminary approach for BPP Holdings plc, the parent company of BPP Law School, valuing the business at £303.5m.

Obviously, that doesn't mean a done deal and the statement issued by BPP's board underlines the fact that the group still has hopes of pursuing an independent strategy. Still, putting down a 70% premium to BPP's share price at the end of Tuesday (28 April) in an all-cash approach "not ... subject to external financing conditionality", suggests Apollo is serious.

The question now is whether a formal offer will materialise after Apollo looks at BPP's books and if the approach will smoke out another (presumably foreign) bidder. Given BPP's clout in the UK vocational market and status as the UK's only for-profit body with degree-awarding powers, it would be a tempting prize.

Lawyers, of course, will be primarily interested in the influence of the approach on the law school. While the education market has gone through much upheaval over the last decade, BPP has clearly emerged along with the College of Law as one of two very dominant players the commercial sector.

Potentially bringing in foreign ownership for such a well-known institution could ruffle some feathers in the profession, particularly given the stronger commercial imperative in the US educational sphere, where Apollo has built a $3bn business.

Apollo would have also, in a single bound, travelled much further than Kaplan, the US education provider than has made steady but unspectacular inroads in the UK via its joint venture with Nottingham Law School. Set against that, the intense competition and unambiguously commercial drift of our legal education sector in recent years hardly suggests a major culture clash under US ownership. Nevertheless, the sizeable band of BPP-bashers, who already find it too brash and trusting, would doubtless find fresh ammunition should this institution fall to the greenback.

And it will have particular relevance for commercial lawyers, since the way the profession structures its earnings means it is already a higher tax contributor proportionately than many domestic industries. With the UK top 50 alone generating in the region of £4bn of profit in 2007-08, two thirds of it in the UK, the rises in tax and related cuts in personal allowances and tax relief on pensions means that from 2010 legal professionals will be contributing hundreds of millions of pounds in extra tax annually, at a time when tax receipts from the City are collapsing. And, unlike most companies, law firms have little scope to manipulate their earnings to cut taxes to mitigate these measures.

It will be interesting to see if the profession seizes on its rising tax burden to demand a stronger public voice, though I doubt it. Perhaps if partners want to take a philosophical view - and many were yesterday - they can view it as paying back the bankers for all those years they helped boost law firm profits, as the lawyers will be helping to pay for cleaning up the mess in banking.

On paper the measures should also give a boost to the prospects for alternative business structures under the Legal Services Act, as the attraction of converting remuneration into lower-taxed capital gains has grown considerably.

There has also been talk that international law firms will seek to shift more operations outside of the UK, though most lawyers are sceptical that the tax rises alone will have much impact. What it will fuel is the wider debate about the future of London as a business centre. The cynics and tax advisers fret that taxing the most mobile labour undermines the City's international drawing power. There is something to this. If good politics is the art of the possible, nowhere is this more true than tax policy; it's been widely established that penal tax rates lower collection rates - the challenge is getting the balance right. The logical move would have been to have extended the already floated 45% income tax rate to earnings over £75,000 or £100,000. Going hardest at the most mobile end of the tax base is risky for a country so dependent on attracting workers to the City.

Set against that, the still relatively generous tax treatment for non-doms will limit the damage, all large Western economies will have to raise tax rates over the next decade and an incoming Conservative administration will likely smooth the rough edges of Darling's recently-discovered re-distributionary zeal.

As such, the long-time risk to the City's position won't come from Europe or even the US - it will come if financial centres in strategically-important emerging economies manage to grind through the global recession without needing major tax hikes. After a pause for breath this year, expect more law firm investment in Asia in 2010 and more mind-numbing lobbying for deregulation from India.

Click here for full details of the Budget, including comprehensive market reaction from a selection of senior lawyers.

As one insolvency veteran comments: "It is value for money? That's a debate, but it's big and it's bloody difficult and if you're a creditor you probably think PwC and Linklaters haven't got enough bodies on it." The fees, which compare to a £77m bill for PwC, is also within typical billing parameters on a major insolvency, especially once you view fees in proportion to assets. PwC estimates European assets under Lehman's control at $50bn (£33.7bn), while $8.7bn (£5.9bn) in cash has been recovered and $12.2bn (£8.2bn) of client assets have now been returned. The collapse of a major investment bank was also uncharted territory, complicated by Lehman's extensive dealings with hedge funds and counterparties. PwC estimates the bank had 22,000 current and historic counterparties at the time of its collapse and left 130,000 over-the-counter derivatives contracts to value.

Still, even with much of the hard work in place in terms of creating the infrastructure and process to handle the stream of claims, which stretched PwC and Linklaters to the limit in the aftermath of Lehman's collapse, the mandate looks set to be comfortably the largest insolvency yet seen in the UK.

With the administrators in March proposing a mechanism to group and return assets via schemes of arrangement, Lehman is still expected to generate several more months of work at a similarly intense pace before it slows. And insolvency specialists predict the job could be generating substantial fees for a very long time, with some talk the process could drag on longer than the landmark administrations of BCCI and Enron's UK arm. It is entirely conceivable Lehman could become the most lucrative mandate ever in Europe in any practice line.

What such a unique assignment tells you about the wider insolvency market is less clear, beyond underlining the crucial importance for City firms of securing what big-ticket insolvency work is around when M&A hits a wall. By consensus activity levels are now up for insolvency lawyers but political pressure on banks and unwillingness of lenders to force procedures that will lead to further write-downs make many believe that restructurings will drive work levels, rather than wind-ups. But Linklaters' insolvency team, which also gets the massive brand benefit of having worked on such a cutting-edge administration, has the luxury during this cycle of considering that an academic debate.