Moreover, not all firms reporting deals always list the names of their professionals. Others, however, list everyone in their team but not the personnel involved on the other side. The result is patchy - and often more a reflection on each professional firm's marketing stance and the efficiency of its PR department.

This does not mean that our league table has no value. Far from it - the table fairly reflects relative activity and deal completion rates, with most of the names one would expect to find in such a league.

But there are some notable absentees. For example, there is no Jonathan Diggines or Gary Tipper of Murray Johnstone; there is no Phil Goodwin of HSBC Private Equity and formerly of 3i; there is no Mike Fell of Granville Private Equity Managers, the only venture capital firm in Manchester with the courage to back John Hargreaves of Matalan. Also, 3i's current Northern chief Ian Nolan is missing, as well as the energetic Richard Young, who left 3i recently to run Manchester University's high tech venture fund.

All of these people are well-known, successful deal-makers and corporate finance advisers. Their absence is technical, rather than real. In some cases, they and their firms have adopted a deliberately low profile and avoid publicity, marketing themselves through recommendation and word of mouth. This is a commendable strategy, but it may not be credible much longer if the majority of their competitors are playing braggadocio.

In other cases, neglect is more the cause: some firms do not fill their Insider forms as assiduously as their competitors do. The problem is often the deal-maker's tunnel vision. Everything focuses on the light at the end of it.

PR and marketing elements are seen as troublesome chores to be sorted out at the end, when everyone is exhausted and slack because of released tension. The deal itself may be confidential. The price may be. But that is no excuse for not reporting the activity and the personnel involved so that the scorekeepers at Insider can try to ensure that the region's statistics are fairer.

As one large firm's PR manager put it when told that Eversheds'; corporate team had scored the largest number of personal hits: "I keep telling our lot to pay more attention to this sort of thing, but they take not the blindest notice. It's an afterthought with them."

We hesitated, therefore, about whether to do the week's analysis which it took to draw up this league table. Would it be valid enough? We decided to go ahead, not least to reward the firms which pay due diligence to Insider's needs as it sets out to establish itself as the journal of record in the Northwest's deals and corporate finance market.

The lesson may be painful to those whose names do not appear or who consider themselves under-represented. Tough. Effective PR and marketing deserve their place in the deal maker's toolkit.

As Richard Hughes and Ian Currie of Apax Partners have observed, the record of deals done is the most effective form of PR there is. Apax shied away from promoting itself by any other means for most of its first three years: it did not want to generate business it could not handle, but Currie and Hughes knew that by quietly ensuring that it publicised its record of achievement, the right sort of people - those who wanted APAX to act for them - would notice.

There is a danger in this, however. Firms with the best-organised PR departments or advisers will wring maximum value from being instructed by Apax to act in one of its deals. Apax, the lead adviser, may hardly appear in the ensuing press releases: any well-organised PR machine is paid to make its client bigger in the reader's eye, not necessarily the firm that engaged the client.

Despite all this, we believe our league table of the 125 dealers with more than 10 mentions in Insider's quarterly listings during the last five years reasonably reflects what is going on in much of the market.

The names at the top chime with our other league tables, which rank solicitors, accountants and corporate finance practitioners by deal volume. They also reflect team sizes, revealing an interesting contrast between those who hunt and work in packs and those who function more like lone wolves.

The top five illustrate this last point perfectly. Four are from Eversheds'; twelve-strong representation in the Top 125, one is from Halliwell Landau, which has seven people in the overall list, and there is one lone wolf in Paul Mitchell, of Rickitt Mitchell, even though he does have two cubs in equal fifty-ninth and equal last place in the list.

Indeed, Mitchell nearly topped the league, being overtaken by Eversheds'; head of corporate, Danny Hall, only in the fourth quarter of 1999. Hall's table-topping performance puts him ahead of Eversheds'; senior partner Edward Pysden, who has long been considered the doyen of Manchester's deal-makers. It is possible, however, that Pysden has been distracted lately by his current chairmanship of pro-Manchester, the representative body for the city's financial and professional services.

Eversheds also provides the region's leading woman deal-maker in Helen Ridge. DLA's up-and-coming Elia Montorio was also in the Top Ten. The general shortage of women in the list, of course, reflects that corporate finance is still very much a man's world, despite the efforts of Amy Ho of Dibb Lupton Alsop, Alison Brearey of Eversheds, Anna Whetton of Chaffe Street, Kate Shorrock of Ernst & Young, Jane O'Sullivan of Garretts, Leila Porter of Eversheds, again, Susan Molloy of Garretts, Tonina Mycock of Chaffe Street and Cindy Quirk of Knight & Sons.

This, however, means that Eversheds scores the best marks for advancing the cause of women, with one in four of its 12 top deal-makers a woman. However, Leila Porter had her heyday in 1996-97, while Alison Brearey's name last appeared in 1998. Helen Ridge has been ever-present and now appears first in a two-person team with Howard Gill on current deals.

Similarly, Hall's most frequent sidekick these days is Chris Moss, with Sarah Allen and Sulbia Khanan brought in on larger transactions. Nigel Dale, Eversheds' head of banking, teams up mostly with Samantha Rollason, while Geoff Blower works with Alex Wilkinson, Stephanie Jones or David Bowcock. All scored individual points last quarter in our dealers' league table.

What might be fairer in gauging strength in depth would be to look more closely at which firms have what total numbers in the Top 125. There are 38 different firms, of which 11 have 'lone wolf' or solus entries.

This shows that Dibb Lupton Alsop has the biggest representation of individual names, with fifteen in the table, nine of whom have been involved in twenty deals or more each. Eversheds has twelve, seven with more than twenty scalps each on their belt, while Addleshaw Booth has eight, five with more than twenty mentions.

Of other lawyers, Halliwell Landau and Chaffe Street have seven each overall, with three and one respectively over twenty. After then comes Garrets with six (none over twenty) and Brabner Holden Banks Wilson (five and one, a creditable performance for a fundamentally Liverpool-based firm). Hammond Suddards has only three, but Patrick Jolly is 13th overall with 30 mentions on his own.

Some of the other obvious big names stand out in all cases: Darryl Cooke of Addleshaws, Tony Harper of Brabners, Richard Hepworth of Chaffe Street, Jonathan Brown & Andrew Holt of Dibb Lupton Alsop and John Whatnall of Halliwells.

That said, some of the smaller law firms have put up some remarkable performances with many fewer resources.