The firm was credited with 59 deals in total last year, representing 27 per cent of all Northern Ireland deals identified in the Experian MarketIQ United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland M&A Review.

Published today, the report, which tracks corporate deals over £500,000 and real estate deals over £15 million, showed Tughans to be Northern Ireland’s busiest legal advisor by deal volume.

Tughans’ submissions to Experian came from a broad range of sectors and included the purchase of Grafton Recruitment by Staffline plc, the acquisition of English company Guardman Group by Co.Tyrone based Westland Horticulture, Henderson Foodservices acquisition of RoI based Barbarrie Duckling Limited, investments into UForm, Elite Electronics and B-Secur, the sale of Farmvet Systems to international pharmaceutical company Vetoquinol and the sale of Camperco to Australian company Apollo.

John George Willis, head of corporate, Tughans, said: “It has been another busy year for the firm, especially the corporate team, which is clear from the Experian results.

“The feature of this year has been lots of mid-market activity rather than the big one-off deals, which is a positive sign for the Northern Ireland economy. Alongside the M&A activity we also continue to see a lot of investment into local companies from various funds from across the UK and RoI attracted to our local talent.”

Patrick Brown, managing partner, Tughans, added: “2018 has been exceptionally robust for the firm in terms of corporate and real estate transactions, building on our success over the last three years.

“The continuing growth in this area of our business, and indeed across the whole firm, has initiated a recruitment drive to further develop our client offering and expand our service provision.”