Travers Smith is aiming to grow its dispute resolution practice by a third over the next three to five years, according to the firm's senior partner, Chris Hale.

The firm is aiming to grow the practice from its current level, where it accounts for 15% of the firm's revenue, to 20% by 2020.

Travers turned over £97.2m in the year to 30 June 2014. The 40-strong, seven-partner disputes practice accounted for around £15m of that revenue.

If Hale's plans come to fruition this will grow closer to £20m by 2020.

Hale said Travers had "traditionally" been focused on transactional work but he wanted to see "balance elsewhere" in the firm.

He added: "You then have to accept that if you are heavily focused on transactional work, you will have seven out of 10 good years but three will be bad. The financial crisis made us rethink whether that was what we wanted to do.

"The hope will be that [dispute resolution] will contribute more in future."

Transactional work currently accounts for around 65% of the firm's total revenue.

Hale said the growth in partners in the dispute resolution practice would be organic, as opposed to making lateral partner hires, in line with the firm's overall strategy of promoting from within.

Several of Travers' current dispute resolution partners joined the firm as associates from magic circle firms.

Hale said the firm would like to continue taking on a limited number of large, high-profile disputes mandates – such as acting on the investigation into the Bank of England's knowledge of foreign exchange market rigging and a £3.4bn dispute between Hewlett-Packard, Autonomy founder Michael Lynch and its former chief financial officer, Sushovan Hussain, over allegations of fraudulent accounting – while combining these with a greater number of smaller disputes.

Hale added: "I'm reluctant to brand us as a mid-market firm. A lot of the work we do is very top-end in both transactions and dispute resolution."

He said there were no targets in place for other practice groups at Travers, though he would like to see the firm take on more financial services regulatory work alongside the growth in disputes work.

Meanwhile, elections for two non-executive positions on the firm's partnership board will take place in the coming months. The non-executives will sit alongside Hale and recently appointed managing partner David Patient.