Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft continues its rise up the charts, posting a satisfactory 16 per cent increase in turnover on the 2004 financial year to £265.4m ($483m). Moreover, its average profit per equity partner rocketed by 21 per cent to £1.4m ($2.5m), making it the third most profitable firm in America, after Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz and Cravath Swaine & Moore.

Although Cadwalader's management attributed the strong profit performance to a bumper year across the board for 2005, the hot team of 2006 has been Bruce Zirinsky's restructuring group. Of the seven associates made up to partner in January, three were from the restructuring teams in New York, Washington DC and London. Cadwalader's New York office received £3.1m ($5.6m) from the Northwest Airlines' bankruptcy, though there was a whiff of controversy when it was revealed the firm had received £549,000 ($1m) from Northwest before the company even declared bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, the London office advised the European Investment Bank on the Eurotunnel restructuring.

In corporate, Cadwalader scored some important transactions, including representing Storage Technology on its $4.1bn (£2.25bn) acquisition by Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati client Sun Microsystems this summer, and its client Pfizer Consumer Healthcare's $16.6bn (£9.12bn) acquisition by Johnson & Johnson.

Overseas, it has been a rollercoaster year for the firm, starting with a dip when the entire London projects team left in January 2006. On the flip side, the firm opened in Beijing in 2005, although it has just the one partner there, namely Mark Roppel.

Still, that did not stop Cadwalader from acting on one of the most significant transactions in China this autumn. It scored the lead role advising one of China's largest asset-management companies, Hua An Fund Management, on an innovative fund, which is the first to be allowed to convert renminbi yuan into foreign currency to be invested overseas.

• The Top 100: 51-75