Ashurst has put a few difficult years behind it after posting a rise in turnover of 7% and in profit per equity partner of 11% for the last financial year. The firm doesn't release total profit figures, but an insider told RollOnFriday that they were also well up.

Partners will be breathing sigh of relief. In 2014/15 the firm somehow bucked a strong market and saw revenue fall 10% and profits per equity partner fall a massive 19%. That followed poor figures for the previous year, and meant that PEP had fallen by nearly 25% since 2012/13 to £603,000. It’s now turned the corner and stands at £672,000. Still not where the firm was at its height but at least heading in the right direction.

    Thank you, Jebus

The firm suffered the twin woes of a disappointing merger with Aussie giant Blake Dawson in 2013 and a subsequent exodus of partners. But it restructured its management team last year and has clearly steadied the ship. Managing Partner Paul Jenkins said that the “consistent focus on driving revenue and lifting profitability across the firm overseen by the new management team has been extremely effective”.

The fact that Ashurst has managed to pull off such a strong performance despite the vagaries of the weak pound / Brexit / Trump etc. suggests that other City firms will follow suit. Expect to see a raft of decent results when they announce next week.

Breaking news: Linklaters has announced that the firm's revenue rose by almost 10% in 2016/17 to £1.44bn. And the firm's PEP was up 8% to £1.5 million in what has clearly been a bumper year.

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Comments

Anonymous 30 June 17 08:59

Those increases are still only against a very poor preceding year, so not as impressive as they might otherwise sound. A drop of 19% in PEP followed by an increase of 11% still leaves them 12% down in aggregate... You also need to wonder what impact all the partner departures had. What EP number do they use to calculate PEP? The number of EPs at the start of the year, or the number at the end, or something else? If they use end of year EP numbers, the massive number of EP departures over the year might also artificially prop up the PEP numbers.