Dream ticket

Step off the train at Guildford, 35 minutes from Waterloo station, and it’s not immediately obvious why former Allen & Overy, Simmons & Simmons and Denton Wilde Sapte partners might feel they’ve enhanced their careers by working there. Let’s be honest, you’d expect the National/Regional Firm of the Year at the 2009 Legal Business Awards to come from somewhere a little more corporate than Surrey. But partners at Stevens & Bolton don’t mind a little ignorance in the form of snobbery: they are proof that you don’t have to glitter to be made of gold.

Scratch beneath the surface and you’ll find a firm that wipes the floor with many regional rivals and puts many London firms to shame (see box ‘Best in Class’). S&B has a higher PEP than London firms Reynolds Porter Chamberlain and Lewis Silkin. It has a profit margin (at 31%) higher than the overwhelming majority of LB100 firms. At S&B, even the librarian is ex-Linklaters and the head of IT is from Sacker & Partners.

Forget disparaging comments on bland suburbia and high street law firms. To the peer group of leading single-site firms outside London that thrive on picking up superb mandates from the City, offering the fabled London service at regional prices, you have to add S&B. Last year, it advised Australian company MYOB Ltd on the sale of part of its UK and Ireland business to Wolters Kluwer UK for £35.5m. S&B is a firm that looks to the dedication of major regional giants such as Wragge & Co and Burges Salmon to single-site quality and could one day be challenging them for profitability. At £360,000, its PEP is currently way off, and its equity is more tightly held than either firm. Nevertheless, S&B is still more profitable and more generous with its equity than other giants in the South, including Clarke Willmott, Bond Pearce, Blake Lapthorn Tarlo Lyons and Shoosmiths.

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