McGrigors has launched a redundancy consultation which could see 40 jobs cuts across the firm's workforce.

The big four Scots firm launched a consultation earlier this week reviewing the roles of at least 30 fee earners and a handful of support staff across all of the firm's offices in Scotland, England and Northern Ireland, with the exception of Manchester.

Practice areas under review include real estate, banking, projects and procurement, corporate and risk advisory solutions.

A spokesperson for the firm commented: "In May 2009 we announced a series of cost-saving measures which we hoped would allow us to ride out the worst of the downturn, protect jobs and safeguard the long-term health of the business in the event of an economic recovery.

"Unfortunately, over the past 12 months it has become increasingly clear that an immediate recovery is not going to emerge, and that we are instead facing a sustained period of market uncertainty – particularly while the effects of the public sector spending review become clear.

"For this reason we have decided to take steps to restructure the business in a way which more closely reflects client demand."

In May last year the UK top 50 firm announced a cost-cutting programme that saw that partners agree to take a 5% reduction in their annual base profit share for the whole of the financial year (1 October 2008 to 30 September 2009), without receiving any additional leave to compensate for it.

Outside of the partnership, the firm asked all staff to take two weeks' unpaid leave between June and the end of September – equating to a pay cut of around 5%.

The firm also froze salaries for 2009 and at that time said that it would not review remuneration again until this month (October 2010).

In November 2008 McGrigors overhauled its partnership and remuneration structure which resulted in 10 partners being de-equitised – equating to 20% of the firm's equity partnership.