Last week, eight firms went head-to-head for the coveted Law Firm of the Year award at the British Legal Awards 2017, with Fieldfisher emerging victorious. Here, we explain the reasons for selecting the firms on the shortlist.

Fieldfisher

Fieldfisher is having a moment. It may not always have seemed like the most dynamic of firms from the outside, but under the leadership of managing partner Michael Chissick (pictured), international expansion and focused strategy are paying dividends. Revenue climbed 34% in 2016-17 to a record high of £165m, with this figure standing at an impressive 16% even when stripping out new office income. Profit per equity partner (PEP) climbed by a similar percentage, with the top of the equity standing at a far from shabby £2m.

The firm has opened six new offices in the past 12 months, including Amsterdam, Birmingham, Shanghai and Beijing, and brought in 22 lateral partner hires during the last financial year.

Key to the firm's success has been its focus on three core sectors: technology, finance and financial services, and energy and natural resources, with specialisms including data protection, intellectual property, competition, outsourcing as well as corporate, finance and litigation.

Its use of technology such as its Condor Alternative Legal Solutions offering has helped the firm win a stack of new clients, and on top of all that, the firm's focus on diversity and inclusion means 75% of its senior associates are female.

Clyde & Co

With compound average annual revenue growth of 12% during the past five years, Clydes is looking pretty unstoppable. In the last decade, revenue has climbed from £134m to £508m, with office count rising from 15 to 48. The insurance-focused firm now has nearly 400 partners and 2,000 legal professionals working across six continents, and it has been this aggressive international expansion that has driven much of its revenue growth.

Clydes opened five new offices during the past year – Chicago, Duesseldorf, Mexico, Miami and Washington DC – and looks unlikely to slow down any time soon, if its ongoing talks with teams at faltering US firm Sedgwick come to fruition.

But its growth hasn't all been outside the UK. Its merger with Scotland's Simpson & Marwick went live in 2015-16, with 2016-17 marking the first full year of revenue from the deal, while expansion in Manchester has helped local revenues grow by 70% to £32m.

Clients include AXA, BP Australia, Experia, Swiss Re and Scottish Power, among many others, with the firm offering a range of pricing approaches from fixed fee, contingency fee, volume discounts to annual or project retainers. On the diversity front, Clydes has been working with Cilex to offer legal apprenticeships, with the firm hoping to build a pool of paralegals who will requalify as solicitors.

Kirkland & Ellis

It's hard to argue with Kirkland's success, both globally and in the UK.

Globally, the firm saw revenue rise 15% in 2016 to $2.65bn against PEP growth of 14% to $4.1m. Likewise, its London arm has also continued to grow, and now comfortably holds its own in revenue terms in comparison to many well-established UK top 50 firms.

Driving this growth has been an ambitious expansion plan that has seen the firm make a stack of partner hires in recent months. London partner count is up by nearly a third during the year to October, with partner count standing at 87 thanks to high-profile laterals from firms including Linklaters, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and Ropes & Gray.

City mandates have included roles for clients including Apax, Bain, Blackstone, Cinven, EQT and Oaktree, as well as new clients such as Brookfield, Charterhouse Lone Star and Vitruvian. Roles for clients such as these have helped propel the firm to the top of Mergermarket's UK M&A tables by value, with the firm also securing high-profile high-yield mandates and restructuring roles on the collapse of UK airline Monarch and the US bankruptcy of Toys R Us.

CMS

If bold moves are a key indication of success, then CMS should be in with a decent chance for the award after successfully pulling off a groundbreaking three-way merger with Nabarro and Olswang to create what the firm, led by senior partner Penelope Warne (pictured, claims will be the UK's sixth largest.

With a focused strategy on sectors including technology, CMS has played a key role on a number of high-profile mandates in the past year, including the £13bn sale of National Grid's UK gas distribution business and the Project Gateway scheme in Manchester, as well as 22 Bishopsgate in London.

On top of pulling off the huge administrative task of uniting three firms in the UK, including taking on offices in Manchester, Reading and Sheffield from legacy Nabarro and Olswang, CMS has also added six international locations to its global footprint: Chile, Colombia, Peru, Monaco, Singapore and Saudi Arabia.

The union has added the likes of Deliveroo, England & Wales Cricket Board, National Grid and Land securities to the CMS client roster, with the firm now advising 97 FTSE-listed companies.

Osborne Clarke

Osborne Clarke is another UK firm that may have arrived late to the international expansion game, but it has been making up for this delay in recent years – and 2016-17 has been no different.

So far this year the firm has announced launches in Sweden and mainland China, adding to last year's expansion into Singapore and New York.

But while opening offices may be expensive, this does not seem to have been hurting OC's numbers. After being a standout performer in 2015-16, with international revenue climbing 23% and UK revenue up 17%, the firm still managed to achieve 12% growth internationally and 7% UK growth in 2016-17, despite the impact of Brexit. Profit, meanwhile, climbed 5%.

Alongside its sector focus, the firm has also been investing in technology, working collaboratively with clients with its HighQ platform and pursuing a 'sit anywhere, work anywhere' strategy everywhere from Hong Kong to London.

Diversity hasn't been neglected alongside this push, with 27% of the 45 partners made up since May 2016 being female, after the firm also last year implemented a five-point plan covering family, female progression/retention, diversity, wellbeing and social mobility.

Gateley

It is fair to say that Gateley has been something of a trailblazer for the legal profession – becoming the first UK law firm to list on London's Alternative Investment Market in 2015.

While it is no longer the sole law firm on the market, with Gordon Dadds and Keystone Law following in its footsteps, so far the listing appears to have been a successful move.

When it floated, the firm – led by CEO Michael Ward (pictured) – set a three-pillar strategy: to differentiate; to diversify through organic growth and the acquisition of non-legal businesses; and to incentivise staff through equity shares.

Since then, it has acquired two non-legal businesses that sit within its real estate advisory services group and launched a global mobility practice.

Revenue climbed 15.7% last year to £77.6m, with adjusted EBITDA up 15.5%.

More than half of its employees have signed up to the firm's 'Save As You Earn' share-save scheme, while other initiatives include a stock appreciation rights scheme for partners and a company share option plan for associates, legal directors and their equivalents.

Latham & Watkins

Retaining its spot as the largest firm in the world by revenue, Latham is solidly and consistently impressive.

Not content with taking on New York, Latham is now well and truly global to a level seen in relatively few US players. Two thirds of its offices are now outside the US, with its record high of 820 international lawyers representing a 12% increase in just two years.

In 2016, the firm advised on 207 cross-border M&A deals, 733 equity and debt capital markets deal, and the firm also has more than 600 litigators across 19 global business centres.

Growing its international ranks clearly requires much expansion and Latham's aggressive pursuit of high-profile names continues unabated.

The firm hired 34 lateral partners between April 2016 and April 2017, with 16 of these joining outside the US and five from magic circle firms. Key hires include Allen & Overy's Ed Barnett in London, Clifford Chance's Simon Cook, Kirkland's Frank Sun in Hong Kong, Herbert Smith Freehills London energy partner John Balsdon and Sanjev Warna-kula Suriya from Slaughter and May, to name but a few.

All in all, a package that makes it hard to argue against the firm's inclusion on the list.

Allen & Overy

Rivals were left questioning if Allen & Overy had been employing some dark arts on its numbers earlier this year when the firm announced its 2016-17 results.

Even against a very strong performance from Clifford Chance, the firm stood out from its closest peers with a 16% hike in revenue to £1.52bn and profits up 27% to £716m.

Since being elected in May 2016, senior partner Wim Dejonghe and managing partner Andrew Ballheimer (pictured) put in place five strategic objectives: a focus on client relationships; investment in network and people, diversity; financial gains; and innovation.

Internationally, the firm has focused its expansion on the US, adding 13 partners since the start of 2016 and adding 30 lateral partners globally. The firm has also ramped up its focus on innovation, making use of a suite of advanced delivery solutions including its Peerpoint contract lawyer service, its online aosphere service, and MarginMatrix, a digital derivatives compliance system developed in conjunction with Deloitte.

Only its progress on diversity let it down this year. A&O has a target to reach a 20% female partnership by 2020, including 30% of all partner promotions each year being women, but this year fell short, making up just two women in a 24-strong round. The firm has now put in place a reinvigorated plan to tackle gender diversity.