Immunisation programmes, climate change and Islamic finance are among the topics of entries that highlight the legal expertise category’s strong twin themes of public policy and international law (click here for rankings).

More classical corporate concerns are also well-represented through cases ranging from the signing of a landmark east African rail concession to an effort to help US companies in Spain comply with new tax laws.

Perhaps most striking is that the last-placed of the 19 entrants to reach commended or higher status is only five marks behind the winner – suggesting that, perhaps unsurprisingly, novel interpretations and uses of the law have become a main preoccupation and selling point of the big firms.

It is perhaps fitting that the top entry – Linklaters’ work on UK-led attempts to provide life-saving vaccinations to millions of children in up to 70 poor countries – could scarcely be more global in scale or politically topical in ambition.

In an echo of the messy and long-running efforts by Gordon Brown, Chancellor at the time and now Prime Minister, to forge a consensus of international support for the immunisation project, Linklaters had the task of turning it from an amorphous mass of ideas to a complex finance structure that worked.

Linklaters came up with a way of helping finance programmes approved by the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, a funding approval body whose members include the World Health Organisation, Unicef, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, government officials, and representatives from the fields of immunisation, health and research.

Projects backed by the alliance are funded through international capital market bonds issued by the International Finance Facility for Immunisation, for which the World Bank acts as Treasury manager. So far, $1bn of bonds have been issued and another $3bn is expected to be raised over the next few years.

Linklaters says the programme “marks a milestone in raising additional resources for development aid” in a way that is “palatable to investors while still meeting respective donor requirements”.

The joint second-placed entry in the category, by Clifford Chance, is one of two submissions that focus on climate change. The firm’s work has focused on standardising documentation relating to emissions trading, which has become a controversial and much-scrutinised area.

A second Clifford Chance entry, in joint fourth place, deals with another hot topic: Islamic finance, which now seems to generate press releases from the big law firms on an almost daily basis. Clifford Chance says demand for financial products that comply with Islamic Sharia law is surging, reflecting an influx of oil wealth to Middle Eastern individuals and companies. The firm, which acted on more than $18bn of Islamic deals last year, estimates the global Islamic financial services industry is now worth between $700bn and $1,000bn.

The firm highlights its work on deals such as the structuring of the $3.5bn sukuk – or Islamic bond – used to help finance DP World’s acquisition of P&O to create one of the world’s largest port operators. Clifford Chance claims the sukuk is the world’s first convertible Islamic bond, allowing holders to exchange their assets for shares in DP World if it carries out an initial public offering within three years.

Another entry involving a high-profile corporate deal is Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom’s defensive work for Arcelor during the hostile takeover by Mittal Steel, during which the firm created special legal structures to protect key assets.

The top-ranked entry for a firm based outside the US or UK is the service provided by Spain’s Uría Menéndez to US investors who had been hit by a 2003 Spanish tax law change that introduced greater disclosure requirements. The firm claims it has made disclosures easier by introducing a web-based reporting system, which collects, processes and submits information about the identity and tax status of US owners of Spanish securities. This has helped encourage US investors previously deterred by the law changes to participate in the market, at a time when Spanish companies in sectors such as energy and infrastructure are becoming increasingly acquisitive overseas and global in their ambitions.

While Uría Menéndez was reacting to a new law, Wragge & Co claims to have helped make one: one of its partners, Michael Whitehouse, collaborated with Albert Mumma, a Kenyan counterpart, to draft the country’s first privatisation act. The work was part of a bigger project, run by the International Finance Corporation, the private sector lending arm of the World Bank, to privatise the vital 2,350km railway, linking the port of Mombasa with Kampala, Uganda’s capital.

Another high-profile entry that claims to involve a legal landmark is Mishcon de Reya’s work for Helen Green, who won £850,000 in a bullying case she brought against Deutsche Bank. The firm’s strategy of taking the case to the High Court rather than an employment tribunal was highly unusual and has helped set a precedent on employers’ duties of care towards employees who are being bullied and harassed.

It is one of many legal boundaries lawyers say they have pushed back in a category that shows how the law is not quite as predictable, certain or constricting as some outside the profession might think.

Case study: Netting victory in fishing dispute

By Ailsa Dixon

In the middle of an international maritime boundary dispute, Barbados detached itself from its continental shelf moorings and started to sail down the Caribbean towards Trinidad and Tobago.

The fantastic voyage – conjured up on a computer screen by Latham & Watkins, lawyers for Barbados, to ridicule Trinidad’s territorial ambitions – was so bizarre that it made the judges fall about laughing.

“You can’t ask for a better outcome than that,” purrs Robert Volterra, leader of the team. “When the two countries were that close together, you could immediately understand the absurdity of Trinidad’s claim.”

The firm’s work on the decades-old case – which earned it joint second place in the legal expertise category – has a wider importance than the hilarity it injected into the sober, high-stakes world of maritime arbitration.

Apart from securing Barbados rights to waters rich in both energy reserves and its national delicacy, flying fish, the firm’s novel use of the United Nations convention on the law of the sea has opened the door to faster resolution of other long-standing maritime disputes.

The firm’s main innovation was to establish the jurisdiction of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, which was able to settle this case in just over two years. Before now, states have had to resort to the International Court of Justice, in an expensive process that can take up to eight years.

The court of arbitration intervened after negotiations between Trinidad and Barbados hit rock bottom due to the arrest of two Barbadian fishermen, who had been caught in Trinidadian waters in February 2004.

The arbitration started later that month, and the landmark ruling – which gave Barbados arguably more than it asked for – was announced in June 2006. The case has already set a precedent in the field of public international law, and has encouraged other areas plagued by intractable boundary conflicts, such as Guyana and Surinam, to follow suit.

Latham’s use of technology established another first for an inter-state maritime case of this kind. Apart from the interactive map that so tickled the judges, the firm showed documentary film footage of Barbadian fishermen as evidence of their right to access Trinidadian waters. The evidence helped Latham secure a legal duty for Trinidad and Tobago to make an agreement with Barbados over their freedom to catch the flying fish in Trinidad’s Exclusive Economic Zone.

Barbados can now look forward to investments in previously untouchable resources, thanks to a judgment that has, in more ways that one, put it on the international legal map.