Macfarlanes has seen profits per equity partner (PEP) jump 20% this year, marking the firm's highest PEP figure since 2008.

PEP at the City firm has climbed to £903,000, up from £752,000 last year, while revenue has also grown 8% to £102.2m over the last 12 months, up from last year's figure of £94.7m.

The firm's corporate practice made the largest contribution to revenue over the last year, bringing in fee income of £38.3m, followed by finance and litigation with turnovers of £18.8m and £17.2m respectively.

The figures mark the highest fee income and PEP Macfarlanes has seen since 2007-08, when the firm reported revenues of £110m and PEP of £1.1m.

Macfarlanes senior partner Charles Martin said: "Overall this is a good set of results for us in a really challenging environment. We have been busy across the board and pretty consistently throughout the last financial year.  Our hedge funds and financial services regulatory businesses have performed strongly. Private client has seen some really significant new business wins. Litigation has been busy in a market that weakened overall during the period. 

"The current year has started encouragingly but it is far too early to predict whether we will see an improvement on last year. We have a long way to go before we get back to historic levels of profitability and a much more challenging environment in which to try to achieve that."

The results come against a drop in average equity partner numbers at the firm over the year from 53 to 47.

Last year Macfarlanes posted modest growth of 2.5% and 4.6% for revenue and PEP respectively.

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