The market has been good to us. The areas in which we’ve been most heavily involved, such as top end private equity, leveraged loans and structured finance, have done very well. Which I suppose explains why profit per equity partner reached over £1 million this year. Maybe that means the credit crunch is going to hit us harder than others. Having said that, I think we’ve built up a sufficiently broad-based practice to be okay.

There could well be some shakeouts elsewhere, though. I’m not sure that all firms are necessarily going to be around five years from now. The bottom end, in particular, looks ripe for consolidation. I think that some of the American firms may also struggle a bit, particularly the ones that expanded overseas simply because everyone else was doing it.

The quality of your work must be unchallengeable, but beyond that I don’t see anything wrong with being a bit of a maverick. Former Ashurst senior partner Martin Lampard, who passed away a few years ago, certainly fell into that bracket. In a very grey City he was the most colourful character you could imagine: unconventional, creative and quite a handful after lunch. He was an influence, not just on me but for many others. Although I think it’s fair to say that my leadership style is rather more understated.

Energy is one of the greatest attributes a lawyer can have. There have been spells during my career where I’ve had to do some really crazy hours. The private equity boom of the late 1980s — probably the hardest-working time I’ve ever seen in the City — was such a period. I remember working 11 weekends out of 14 during the summer of 1989 on the takeover of Gateway. And I don’t mean just popping in for a couple of hours. It was 8am to 9pm stuff, followed by a phone call at 3am from a client in their summer house in the Hamptons just wanting a quick word.

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Overly risk averse lawyers annoy me. As a profession we’re moving away from sending clients ten pages of email about possible complications, but there are still a hell of a lot of pedants about. Lawyers who take themselves too seriously are my other bugbear. Good heavens, you find plenty of those around too, pontificating and generally behaving as if every word is a sort of pearl falling from their lips, when in fact most of it is complete rubbish.

I used to be quite into fox-hunting. Naturally, I haven’t done any since it was made illegal. Having learnt to ride as a kid it was just something I’d always wanted to do, and I ended up going off to hunts fairly regularly for about ten years. It certainly takes your mind off whatever is going on at work.

I’d wanted to study English at Cambridge. I saw myself becoming a journalist in those days; wearing a grubby mac and working on the Tamworth Chronicle, or something like that. But the fear of ending up as a teacher made me do law instead. From the start, commercial was the only area I ever considered. I certainly had no desire whatsoever to be a high street solicitor or go off and get mixed up in other people’s mucky personal problems.

Clients rarely pick lawyers on the basis that one is better than the other. Because one is rarely better than the other. There are, after all, a lot of bright people around. The other myth is that clients want specialists. They don’t. They want an adviser who they like and trust. The rest, as far as they’re concerned, can go on behind the scenes.

Money is pretty important to me. Principally because I like nice holidays. I suppose it’s also linked to being respected by one’s peer group — something that, according to some research I read the other day, is especially important to members of the baby boom generation, of which I am one. Having said that, I did turn down the opportunity to go into private equity a few years ago. God, I’d probably be worth £500 million by now if I’d done that.

I miss the buzz of doing deals. The adrenalin, the camaraderie, reading about them in the newspapers the next day . . . But then I wouldn’t have wanted to have stayed doing the same thing forever. Which is why I became senior partner, and also why, after ten years in the position, I’m off to Asia next March to start up our new Hong Kong office.

Geoffrey Green has been senior partner of Ashurst since 1998

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