The City’s leading law firms do not have a proud record of promoting women to their senior ranks, but a new firm, to be spun off today from Allen & Overy, Britain’s fourth biggest law firm, is set to turn the gender bias on its head.

Twenty-three lawyers and support staff from Allen & Overy’s private client practice, which specialises in tax planning for families with international fortunes, are setting up their own firm after they were forced out in a shake-up of the “magic circle” firm.

The launch of Maurice Turnor Gardner is one of the most significant start-ups in the legal sector in several years and a first for a City law firm: it will be staffed and run mostly by women. All but one of the six partners are women, with only four male employees in total.

Emphasising the new firm’s gender make-up, the partners took the unprecedented step of drafting the partnership agreement in the female voice. “Each Member will devote her whole time and attention to the [firm’s] business during normal hours,” it reads. A veteran partnership expert with another firm said that he had never seen rights and responsibilities set out in that way.

Richard Turnor, the lone male partner, said that Maurice Turnor Graham had not set out to send a feminist message and that it would recruit men and women. However, he said that it seemed “ridiculous” to draft the partnership agreement in traditional masculine terms when most of the partners were women.

The firm will be run by Clare Maurice, who, in 1985, became the first woman partner at Allen & Overy. It will operate from Allen & Overy’s Spitalfields premises until it moves into its own offices in the City in July.

Ms Maurice said that the firm expected to be profitable in its first year. “In the depths of a recession some may question our timing but, in fact, it is absolutely right,” she said.

Allen & Overy was the last big City law firm to have a sizeable private client practice. Even the wealthiest individuals are no longer considered lucrative enough when set against the fees that can be generated by dozens of lawyers advising on deals for global corporations and banks. Allen & Overy closed the unit as part of an overhaul that has resulted in the loss of about 450 jobs, including 47 partners.

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