If Anne Baldock wants to consult her predecessor on the running of Allen & Overy’s global projects, energy and infrastructure group, she won’t have to go far: the group’s previous head was her husband of 17 years, Graham Vinter.

Vinter, who left Allen & Overy to become general counsel at BG Group, the energy giant, in November, was one of the City’s best-known project finance lawyers. Not to mention the driving force behind a practice that, according to Dealogic, worked on more projects around the world in the past five years than any other.

But Allen & Overy hasn’t lost much by elevating his wife to the role: Baldock is not only an established name in the field in her own right but one of the most senior woman lawyers in the “magic circle”. A competitor at an American firm describes her, without hestitation, as “a class act”.

A straight-talking woman with a playful, self-deprecating sense of humour, Baldock is modest when asked about her plans, preferring instead to praise the team she has inherited. “There’s clearly a huge enthusiasm within the firm for this kind of work,” she says, “and we’ve always had a bloody good time doing it. That becomes infectious for your associates and clients realise that this is something that is important to you. That helps a lot.”

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There may be no better way to ensure continuity than to replace a departing manager with his spouse — but isn't it a little incestuous? Wasn’t working so closely in the same field, the same department for so many years claustrophobic? “Actually, it worked surprisingly well,” Baldock says. “We made a conscious effort never to work on the same transaction. We tended to have very different clients and to try to deal with different areas of practice so that we didn’t cross.”

Baldock says their home in Surrey, which they share with a daughter, 16, and two sons, aged 14 and 10, is simply too busy with shuttling children between dressage competitions and ice hockey games or tending to their animals for time to be wasted contemplating the laws of contract or syndicated bank loans. “It’s safe to say it wasn’t ever a topic around the breakfast table,” she says.

Baldock made her name in the mid 1990s as one of the pioneers of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), which provides for the construction of public works — roads, bridges, prisons, hospitals, schools, waste treatment plants — using private sector funds. Baldock was involved in the construction of Bridgend Prison, said to be the first PFI deal to close in the UK, the Lewisham extension of the London Docklands Light Rail, and, recently, the bidding for the extension of the M25.

Critics of PFI charge that it allows the private sector to profit while the Government holds most of the risk, but Baldock defends the scheme: “Without the programme the schools and hospitals that we have and the decent roads that we have just clearly would not have been built,” she says. “I think people forget that. If you go back to the early 90s, there was an awful lot of very crumbly infrastructure here.”

Although Allen & Overy remains the leading adviser on PFI transactions, it has faced competition from regional firms as the market has matured and deals have become standardised. It makes little sense, after all, for a consortium building a hospital in Manchester to hire a City firm if local lawyers can do the work just as easily for less. Standardisation has also led to transactions sometimes being overcomplicated, Baldock says, as the faces on both sides of the table have gotten younger and less experienced. “People are perhaps left alone a little too early,” she says.

But if PFI has lost some of its lustre in the UK, opportunities have opened up as the scheme has been adopted overseas, particularly in Western Europe, the Middle East and Latin America. One of the challenges of Baldock’s tenure will be to build a substantial PFI practice in the US — not easy at a time when Stateside profits are eaten into by an unfavourable exchange rate.

Baldock says she enjoys the diversity of project finance (“I know a lot about skid resistance on roads,” she quips), but she joined the group only reluctantly; her ambition initially was to be a corporate lawyer. As it happens, her career has been a series of such happy accidents. One of three sisters born to an architect in Gravesend, Kent, a town she describes as “only notable because Pocahontas died there”, Baldock flunked her A-levels after a bout of glandular fever that wasn’t diagnosed at the time. Luckily, she interviewed well, and was granted a place at the London School of Economics, where she studied law. “You must be the person in the City that has the lowest A-level grades,” a former lecturer needled her when she met him again recently. After graduating, she applied to only half-a-dozen City firms, including the prestigious Allen & Overy, but she got the date wrong and turned up for her interview there four days late. Fortunately, the firm saw the funny side of it.

At the time Baldock joined Allen & Overy, in 1982, there were fewer than ten women at the firm. She expected to find an “extremely stuffy” environment but insists she has never been discriminated against by her colleagues. “There was never any of that, actually.” In fact, it wasn’t until she was seconded to Chase Manhattan, the American investment bank, in 1986, that she was condescended to because of her sex.

The number of women at City law firms has increased significantly since then — these days over half of new recruits to the top firms are women — but Baldock admits she finds the inequality that remains at partner level puzzling. “I had assumed that as more women were taken on, more would go through,” she says. “That’s taking a lot longer than I would’ve anticipated.” Baldock believes this is because women are choosing not to join the partnership for lifestyle and family reasons rather than because of any lingering prejudice. “We’re fairly lucky,” she says. “We do have choices about what we do in our career and I don’t think men get those choices. Whether you’ll ever get an equalisation, I don’t know.”

Baldock admits her own ability to maintain a full work schedule while having a family has been greatly aided by a “fantastic” nanny, but she also pushed for flexible working arrangements for lawyers in her team. For example, she introduced a file management system that allowed them to work from home without carting around piles of documents. “The way we dealt with paper hadn’t really changed much since the firm opened in 1930,” she says. Visitors to the firm’s offices in Canary Wharf are struck by how tidy they are, how free of clutter and paperwork. The layout is also — oddly, for a law firm — open plan, another Baldock initiative. Everyone sits together, even the partners.

“There were a couple of people who were very, very nervous about working in open plan, some of the slightly older partners,” she says. “But some of those that were most vociferous against it absolutely loved it. Those senior people were suddenly much more accessible. The sharing of that knowledge and passing down of experience became much easier and more tangible. You could actually see it happening.”

This flair for management would seem to mark Baldock as an obvious contender to become the “magic circle’s” first woman managing partner. (She sat on Allen & Overy’s global management board from 2000 to 2006.) But the question is barely entertained. “Someone asked me [about my plans for the future] the other day and I said, blimey, I’ve got three kids, I don’t know what I’m doing at the weekend.” She would say that, of course. Don’t rule it out.

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