Wragge & Co is firming up plans to shift Lawrence Graham (LG) partners into an all-equity structure, with the firm set to vote in members of a new remuneration committee to oversee the transition.

The firms are set to formally merge on 1 May, creating a £171m firm named Wragge Lawrence Graham & Co.

The two partnerships will elect a team of around five partners, drawn from both firms, to sit on a remuneration committee over the coming months.

The committee will assess how to allocate profits to LG's 35 non-equity partners and whether they should be made up to equity status when they join Wragges.

Wragges senior partner Quentin Poole (pictured) said: "It is not practical to expect all fixed share partners to join the equity from the start, so the committee will be looking at exactly how the practice will evolve from fixed share to floating share."

The firm plans to return to a 100% equity partnership structure once the merger has bedded in, although there has been no indication of how long this will take.

Poole has said he expects the bar to the equity at the combined firm will be set slightly lower than it currently is at LG, as a result of the scrapping of fixed-share status.

There will be more partner promotions for legacy LG lawyers at the combined firm than there would have been under LG's current structure.

He added that there is no clear idea of how long the transitional period will last but that it would not happen within the first year of the merger.

Poole said: "It is hard to predict how long the transition will take. We anticipate there will be a backlog of partners that will move from fixed share status into the equity. We do not plan to start expanding out the ranks of fixed-share partners so Wragges partners will remain unaffected by the plans."

LG currently offers bonuses but it is expected that there will be no bonus pool in the new structure. Wragges currently does not award bonuses.

Both firms operate with meritocratic pay systems and are expected to continue remunerating their partners based on performance in the new structure.

No lock-in period has been put in place for partners at either firm.

The combination will gift Wragges with the expanded London presence it has been seeking since the turn of the decade. The combined number of partners would reach 189 and combined turnover to £172.3m, putting the firm just outside the UK top 20, according to last year's financial results.

At the end of 2012-13 LG recorded profit per equity partner (PEP) of £260,000, down 14.2% on the previous financial year, while PEP at Wragges climbed by 2.7% to £339,000.