Slater & Gordon has apparently taken some of its most profitable work away from lawyers who refused to accept less favourable employment contracts.

Last month RollOnFriday reported that S&G had told asked its legacy Fentons associates to sign up to new contracts with inferior bonus arrangements. Some of these associates told the firm where to stick it, and S&G was accused of bullying them into accepting the new terms.

Now an insider claims that the firm has found an ingenious way out of this mess. It has simply taken the juiciest work away from the truculent lawyers, or moved them to less profitable departments, to ensure that they won't get any bonuses anyway.

An S&G associate yesterday

Fee earners in Manchester who had stuck to their Fentons terms had been expecting a reasonable bonus based on forecast fee income from their current caseloads. But the insider claims that some of them have now had their biggest cases taken away and assigned to colleagues who have, no doubt entirely coincidentally, signed up to the new low bonus contracts. Other legacy Fentons fee earners, who had previously conducted a mixed caseload, are apparently being transferred to the pile 'em high sell 'em cheap fast track teams on the Quindell side of the business. Where it seems they will have no hope of achieving the financial threshold at which the existing bonus scheme would bite.

A spokeswoman for the firm declined to comment on the allegations.