Pinsent Masons crowned Law Firm of the Year at The Lawyer Awards

This year’s judges – a panel of in-house general counsel, The Lawyer Hot 100 alumni and managing partners of major international firms – recognised the firm’s achievements over the past year, from continuing to be a market leader across its five key sectors, to expanding its revenue streams outside of traditional legal services through a range of innovative ‘New Law’ products. The sheer diversification of these businesses, including Vario’s flexible lawyer service, Yuzu’s ‘in-sourcing’ tool for GCs and Brook Graham’s diversity consultancy, were highly lauded.

The judges also commended the firm’s desire to lead on gender diversity, with the firm one of the first in the sector to publish its gender pay gap data. Pinsent Masons has also succeeded in raising the percentage of women in its partnership from 17 per cent to 25 per cent in five years, and four of its nine board members are female.

The firm has acted on several significant deals globally in the past year, including advising Shell UK on its $3.8bn sale of North Sea assets to Chrysaor; Laing O’Rourke on AU$955m Sydney Metro Central Station; ING and Commonwealth Bank of Australia on a pilot AI program for MiFID II; and advising Redefine International on the disposal of its German retail portfolio of 66 properties for €205m.

Richard Foley, Senior Partner at Pinsent Masons, said:

"Our focus at Pinsent Masons remains on how we do what we do. Our values, our culture and our responsible business programme have never been more important, and the level of engagement around those programmes both within the business, and from our client base, is at its highest ever. We’ve expanded globally by investing in three new offices, and also invested in how we deliver legal services by prioritising how best to combine people, processes and technology to deliver legal services in a different and better way. We are living through an era of disruption with our clients, so how we behave and how bold we are prepared to be in challenging the status quo has never been more important to them. Our financial results, year-after-year, are evidence of the benefit of investing in being an organisation that clients enjoy working with.”

Pinsent Masons recently reported its 2017/18 financial results, achieving a 10% increase in fees billed. The firm's total global turnover for the year stood at £449.8m, representing turnover growth of over 40% and profit growth of 60% over the past five years.