Silver Circle stalwart Travers Smith powered through the £700,000 PEP benchmark last year while posting a 25 per cent rise in turnover, from £54.5m to £68.1m.

The results will surprise few in the City. If ever there were a firm well positioned to ride an M&A wave, it is Travers.

Equally, as you might expect would be the case with any firm where more than half of the revenue is derived from its corporate group, Travers is particularly vulnerable to a downturn. Its figures for the years between 2001 and 2004, when turnover barely changed and PEP fell from £515,000 to £390,000, highlight just how dependent it is on a healthy deal flow.

Equally, however, its rebound in the past two years, when PEP rocketed from £415,000 to last year's £705,000, proves the upside can be pretty good too.

Last year the top of the equity made it to seven figures. Indeed, the bottom of Travers' equity, at £400,000, would be a more than satisfactory figure for most firms.

The figures prove the worth of a pint-sized international strategy. At £186,000, Travers (which has just three offices - London, Paris and Berlin, the latter two boasting fewer than 10 lawyers and a combined revenue of £1.5m) has a better profit per lawyer (PPL) than Linklaters, although its RPL of £383,000 compares less well (Linklaters is squeezing £451,000 out of its troops).

Most of the profit (95 per cent) at Travers is distributed on a straightforward 10-year 1:2 lockstep. The remaining 5 per cent is retained for merit-based allocation.

Travers' standout deal of 2005-06 was the $6bn (£3.27bn) merger of Telewest and ntl, on which it advised ntl. It also advised the management on the £2.18bn sale of Coral Eurobet, Macquarie Bank on the £1.8bn acquisition of motorway service stations and Peel Ports on its £771m takover of The Mersey Docks and Harbour Company.