Last year was when the transactional firm par excellence, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, woke up to the fact that it had lost ground in its core market: corporate. To the rescue came London departmental managing partner Tim Jones, wielding a restructuring sword that left his group realigned along sector lines and ready to compete.

Jones called his initiative a "a root and branch" restructuring of the London corporate group. The team had been all but stagnant for four years and needed a good kicking. Jones, a pugnacious and charismatic rugby-playing lawyer, was the man to do it, but he would need the buyin of his key team leaders.

Enter Mark Rawlinson, Ed Braham and Will Lawes. Each partner - all strong characters in their own right - now heads a distinct group within the London corporate team which, taken together, covers all of Freshfields’ core markets.

The idea is not rocket science; Jones happily admits as much. It is simply offering more of what Freshfields’ clients want by reorganising along sector lines. But the fact that it took Freshfields so long to recognise change was needed suggests that Jones’s willingness to shake things up a bit is even more impressive. Freshfields has long been seen as a bit of a club - and it takes a strong character to make waves among colleagues.

It may be more than a year or more before there is any hard evidence of whether the new structure has produced results, but revenue for the first quarter of the current financial year was up 18 per cent on 2004-05. "We’ve arrested the decline of the revenue but we haven’t pushed the business forward over the last four years," said Lawes. "We needed to create more energy and we hope this is the way we’ll do it." Put money on it.