Allen & Overy has made up 16 partners in its 2014 round, three fewer than last year, seven fewer than in 2012 and under half the 33 who were made up at the top of the market in 2006.

London was the winner geographically, with five new partners. Hong Kong and Dubai each got three, Australia two (from Perth and Sydney) and Frankfurt, New York and Amsterdam made up the rest. Wim Dejonghe, the firm's Managing Partner, said that "it gives me great pleasure to welcome these talented individuals to the partnership".

The fact that there are so few doesn't come as a huge shock, although it'll hardly encourage the firm's senior associates to hang around. Things are very different from the boom years, many firms have too many partners in the wrong areas and equity is being cut and reshaped across the City. But it is as surprising as it is depressing that only two of the partners are women.

A&O's new partners - how they might look

A&O is the first firm to release its figures this year. And despite the results, the firm seems to have tried to encourage talented female lawyers to move through the ranks: in 2010 it introduced a ground breaking part time policy for partners which, in theory, allowed them to take all the school holidays off. At the time Senior Partner David Morley said he hoped it would remove "some of the existing obstacles to promotion faced in particular by women". It clearly hasn't removed enough given that they only make up 12.5% of new partners. Even the Bar, that bastion of diversity and forward thinking, does better, with women making up 18% of this year's QCs.

A spokesman for the firm said “this clearly isn't where we want to be. While women made up over 40% of those partners being promoted a few years ago, we very evidently need to keep working hard on what is an industry wide issue.”