The biggest challenge facing Braham and co will be keeping complacency at bay

Good bench, strength in depth, sensible management and flair – you would be forgiven for thinking Deal Week has lapsed into football punditry. But even if it can't match the glamour of the Premier League there's one team that currently gets City lawyers reaching for the sporting superlatives: Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer's on-form corporate practice.

Perhaps the biggest sign of success for a practice that has re-invented itself twice in the past decade – the Bruckhaus merger and a restructuring in 2005 – is that the plaudits come not from the firm's PR machine, but the mouths of its closest rivals.

With the firm once again reshuffling the management of its corporate practice, the question will be whether the firm can maintain its four-year run of excellence.

A good deal of Freshfields' recent success can be traced to 2005 when Tim Jones called in three of its most prominent lawyers and, as one partner puts it, "got us moving in the same direction," across M&A, private equity, securities and financial institutions work. The shake-up, which saw Jones, Mark Rawlinson, Ed Braham and Will Lawes take on four London sub-teams, was greeted with near-derision by rivals, but proved to be successful in helping the firm to shake itself out of a period of inertia. At this time, the firm took a hard look in the mirror and didn't like what it saw – a mood that also led to streamlined, firmwide practice management and its partnership restructuring in 2006-07.

The corporate shake-up also underlined a shift in culture, emphasising business-winning and moving quickly on opportunities. As such, corporate has continued to spot trends early – seen by its success in positioning itself in the past two years for restructuring work and shoring up its relationship with banks ahead of the credit crunch.

Also extremely helpful has been the sustained strength of its German corporate practice, which has made maximum benefit of a national legal market that has held up better during the downturn then many Western economies.

Freshfields also argues it has established the only Europe corporate practice that is pre-eminent in public M&A, private equity and equity capital markets.

What next then as the firm reshuffles its leadership roles? Braham, as head of corporate, is expected to maintain a consensual style at the firm. Chris Bown, who did an excellent job of quietly organising Freshfields' private equity practice after joining from Baker & McKenzie, looks a safe pair of hands to take over 'team B', which is heavily focused on sponsor clients. Philip Richards, taking over 'team A', which focuses on funds and regulatory for financial institutions, also brings a solid pedigree.

Whatever the structure, the focus on business-winning will remain with the firm expressing a desire to claim more FTSE scalps in the near future. An early victory on that front was Freshfields' recent appointment as BT's main adviser – displacing Linklaters.

The firm also looks very well stocked with corporate partners coming into their prime to complement the older guard. Among them Julian Makin and Simon Witty's much-touted capital markets team, as well as Andrew Hutchings, Claire Wills and Ben Spiers, that latter credited with the BT success. Risking a last sporting cliche, their eyes would appear to be firmly on the ball.

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer on the Legal Week Wiki