After three years of gruellingly cautious optimism, lawyers still have not entirely gotten used to actually being optimistic, despite what has been, by any yardstick, one hell of an H1.

Early statistics suggest global M&A will hit an all-time high this year in value terms, though the prevalence of mega-deals can not quite conceal the fact that deal volume in Europe is still a way off 1999-2000 levels.

The second quarter was also notable as the first three-month stretch for five years in which public bids eclipsed private equity. Then again, it could be that public acquirers and investment banks have simply stolen buy-out houses' bag of tricks, with a string of companies launching consortium bids backed by plenty of debt, often for non-cyclical assets with strong cashflows.

Turning to firm performance, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer continues its outstanding run, outstripping all comparable rivals on the European stage. Slaughter and May picked up some momentum with a solid run of deals in the £1bn to £5bn range. Linklaters, aside from its instruction on the Suez's merger with Gaz de France, looked low-key given market conditions.

However, the most obviously improved runs came from Herbert Smith and Ashurst, two firms that have underperformed expectations in corporate for several years. Herbert Smith will have mixed feelings over BAA falling to Ferrovial but it still bagged a lead role on the UK's most closely-watched deal of the year. Other notable roles include advising Resolution on its £3.6bn acquisition of Abbey's assurance business, acting for Warner Music on abortive merger talks with EMI and a run of quality instructions for Chinese issuers.

Ashurst, meanwhile, benefited from a string of substantial private equity deals before securing a show-shopping instruction for the Goldman Sachs consortium on its ultimately unsuccessful BAA bid. The mood at both firms also seems palpably more confident.

Perhaps surprisingly, such upbeat sentiments are not universal. The battering stocks have taken has pretty much shut the IPO market until autumn, and there are also a lot of unsuccessful bids around. Many are predicting, in marked contrast to 2005, a classic summer slowdown. Or perhaps that is just knackered partners' wishful thinking.

Caning tables

The half-year point brings us also to the familiar issue of deal rankings, which are becoming further detached from reality. Research carried out earlier this year by Legal Week and Mergermarket into lead corporate roles confirmed what many suspected: conventional rankings routinely over-state the standing of many firms while others, notably Freshfields and Slaughters, are under-represented.

To a considerable extent, this discrepancy is thanks to market shifts, with consortium deals and competition-heavy bids leaving a handful of large deals to generate more credited advisers – no less than 22 in the case of Mittal's drawn-out takeover of Arcelor. Multiple credited advisers mean heavily-skewed rankings as a far wider pool of firms are in line for secondary roles.

Throw in US securities mandates, and you have eight US law firms ranked in Mergermarket's top 20 for European M&A, including several firms with virtually no local law capacity. And while the top-ranked Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom has made massive strides, no one would seriously argue the firm is level pegging with a magic circle firm in Europe. Ironically, Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, arguably the stand-out US firm in Europe over the last 12 months, is only 19th in the H1 rankings.