All quiet on the private equity front? The industry has been among the hardest hit by the summer’s credit crunch, the buyout frenzy of the past few years halted by the banks’ sudden circumspection. But Charlie Geffen, head of private equity at Ashurst, remains hopeful.

“After a September stall there is more confidence in the market and both sponsors and banks are starting to work on deals,” he says. “Some of which are as competitive as they were before the summer. There is no doubt the average deal size will be down compared to the first half of the year, but deals will be done.”

Geffen would say that. Few lawyers are as closely associated with the industry; he is, as Chambers UK notes, “undoubtedly one of the most famous private equity lawyers anywhere”. Just look at his list of clients — it reads like a who's who of Europe's leading buyout firms. He insists on listing all of them, lest he offend anyone: Apax, Apollo, Blackstone, Bain, Candover, Cerberus, Charterhouse, Cinven, Cognetas, General Atlantic, LGV, Stirling Square, TA Associates, Terra Firma.

The world of private equity can be notoriously cliquey and alpha male-dominated — read Catrin Griffiths’ piece in The Lawyer, “The private equity market: how to win friends and influence people”. Private equity houses tend not to run beauty contests. They know who the good lawyers are. Nor do they suffer fools. “You could put a two-year qualified lawyer in front of a FTSE100 finance director and they would add value,” Geffen says. “If you did the same with a senior private equity person, they’d eat him for breakfast.”

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Geffen, 48, is of average height with dark hair, thick eyebrows and rimless glasses; he wears a grey chalk-striped suit and white checked shirt without a tie. A father of four, he unwinds on weekends by riding horses and admits to being something of a workaholic (“How do you achieve a balance?” “Most people would say I don’t”). But while he talks in the argot of the deal lawyer, of "sponsors", “mandates” and “debt multiples”, he doesn't indulge in chest-thumping.

“You don’t have to be that clever to be a lawyer,” he says. “There are very, very few people who get business because they are clever. They tend to be tax lawyers, regulatory people, that kind of thing. What I do is about relationships and about service, getting on with people. And being constantly available.”

Geffen is "not an academic person,” he admits. He was good at mathematics at high school but felt it would be too difficult at university, so he studied law instead, at Leicester. His father was a High Street solicitor but never pushed him towards the profession; rather, it was a friend who persuaded him.

Geffen found law easy because it was “boring and simple”. “It was like maths," he says. "You learn a rule and write it down. There were clever historians and English graduates who were used to writing well thought-out essays and arguments, but that’s not what it was about. You could score as many points by writing ten lines as you could in two pages, and that appealed to me.”

Geffen joined Ashurst in September 1982 and qualified two years later. It was a lucky time to start: British industry was beginning to haul itself out of the economic doldrums of the late 70s and early 80s. There was a “wave” of initial public offerings for a young associate to cut his teeth on, and Ashurst had just completed one of the UK’s first major buyouts, the privatisation of National Freight.

Back then, the market consisted of only a handful of players, their deals dwarfed in size by corporate takeovers. But that worked to Ashurst’s advantage.

“From the mid-80s to the other side of the recession in the early 90s, it was basically just us and Clifford Chance doing pretty much everything,” he says. “You got to know everyone pretty well.”

That changed dramatically as the buyout market exploded and Ashurst's rivals, particularly the US-based firms, began offering enormous amounts of money to lawyers with private equity experience in an effort to catch up. But Geffen believes Ashurst remains in a stronger position than most of their competitiors.

“The Americans have got some fantastically able people, they’ve recruited some really great guys,” he says. But he argues that they haven't got the depth and experience to match Ashurst, Clifford Chance and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer.

“People talk about the value of years of experience and sometimes it’s quite hard to grasp because it’s intangible. When something difficult comes up, three, four of us can sit in a room and just talk about it for an hour. That brings together a huge amount of experience. If you’re on your own in an organisation, you haven’t got that. I think that must be hard.”

Ashurst had a strong year last year, with turnover increasing 29 per cent to £275 million, making it the UK’s tenth largest law firm by revenue, according to Legal Business, a trade magazine. Partners at the top of the equity each received a reported £1.2 million.

Geffen, who sits on the firm’s management committee but describes himself as “non-executive”, is optimistic but philosophical about the firm's future.

He predicts the top end of the market will be split among six global giants (Allen & Overy, Clifford Chance, Freshfields, Latham & Watkins, Linklaters, and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom) and "very high quality" specialists such as Slaughter and May and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.

“That global six is much more distinct than it was ten years ago,” he says. “Ten years ago there were other firms aspiring to that; now they’re not within a million miles of it."

But Ashurst doesn't fit easily into either camp. They're not on the same footing in terms of prestige and quality as Slaughter and May, but nor are they able to match the international reach of Clifford Chance.

To date, they have had success by growing organically. “Take the finance practice here,” Geffen says. “When I started, we didn’t have one. We started on the leveraged side, representing private equity firms against banks. The banks liked what they saw, then we started getting work from them.

"It’s not Clifford Chance or Allen & Overy in terms of the breadth of the product range, but in terms of what we do, we’re absolutely class. That’s an extraordinary achievement. How has it happened? I dunno. A combination of able people, energy, luck.”

But Geffen concedes that Ashurst may have to change course in future to keep up with the global juggernauts.

“There’s clearly going to be room for different types of law firms,” he says. “Macfarlanes, Travers Smith, Hengeller Mueller: they’re all very strong in their own markets and will continue to do very well. But what have seen is that it is very, very hard to go from not being a global law firm to a global firm organically. People who have tried to do that have regretted it. They’ve expanded too quickly in a slightly unfocused way and have run into challenges.

"Who knows? At the moment, touch wood” — he slaps the table in front of him — “we’re going like a train.”

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