There must be an element of the glutton for punishment about Mr Ronan Molony, who has just agreed to a third term as chairman and managing partner of major commercial law firm, McCann FitzGerald.

He recognises that the job is not for everybody, with other lawyers likely to run a mile from the occasionally-irksome management responsibilities that it can carry. Seven years on from first taking the job however, he says he is "into" running the McCann FitzGerald business.

He has by this stage developed a definite liking for what he modestly describes as the business of making sure the "trains are running" so that the rest of the firm's solicitors can get on with practising law.

And practise law they do. By the last count, McCann FitzGerald was active in almost 20 different areas of commercial practice, with about 400 staff, including 64 partners, in place to allow this to happen. That's a lot of trains to keep running.

"You're serving a whole variety of markets at one time; you just don't make a particular widget," says the managing partner. Still there must be some compensation for the headaches that the job such as that of Mr Molony would carry.

One informed industry observer estimates that the longest-standing equity partners (not necessarily the managing partner) in large Dublin commercial firms could be on annual incomes of more than €700,000.

The accuracy of such figures would be hard to prise out of Mr Molony, or indeed out of any of his handful of counterparts in other large Irish commercial firms. But they help to offer a indication of the value that the market places on individual lawyers. Unfortunately an indication is all that is available just now, with law firms traditionally as coy as can be on releasing their income or profit numbers. This position is supported by company law, which does not require partnerships to publish their accounts.

Mr Molony says he personally has no great "hang-up" about greater financial transparency but adds that one has to "recognise the status quo".

The old argument that is used to justify the secrecy is that because partnerships have unlimited liability, clients can always be assured that the business can, at a push, be backed by all of the personal assets of the partners.

In effect this means that individuals' houses and pensions could be at risk in the event of financial difficulty.

Limited liability partnerships, on the other hand, would protect these personal assets, thus forcing partners to reveal more of the financial information of the firm as a comfort to their clients.

The structure is becoming reasonably popular in the UK and Mr Molony thinks it will eventually transfer to the Republic. Until then we must hold our breath on fee income or profits.

Since Mr Molony became chairman, McCann FitzGerald has doubled its headcount and significantly extended its reach in the marketplace.

This growth will soon be reflected in a physical shift when McCann FitzGerald moves offices across the river to a new Docklands building that is almost double the size of its existing space. The project has featured in the news over the past few months because it carries with it the prospect of a substantial financial benefit for the firm's lawyers (some say it could be more than €600,000 each), who have agreed a sale and leaseback deal on the building with the Quinlan Partnership and Alanis.

Mr Molony says this windfall is possible but "very unlikely", noting that it does not take account of factors such as fit-out and the 20 years that still has to run on the company's existing IFSC lease. He simply says the new deal will "enable" the firm to take on the financial risk that the move entails.

Recent business at McCann FitzGerald includes a mandate for the C&C flotation, with the firm also involved in the take-privates of Arnotts, Riverdeep and Alphyra over the past year. It is also playing a role in practically every major infrastructure project in the Republic, with several teams of its lawyers working with the National Roads Authority at any one time.

Banking now accounts for about 25 or 30 per cent of business, with the IFSC bringing in about 10 to 15 per cent.

This latter business is arguably the area for which the firm is best known these days, perhaps because of its current location in the IFSC district of Dublin 1. The IFSC practice attracted some unwanted attention earlier this year when it emerged that one of McCann FitzGerald's partners was a non-executive director of Eurofood, the IFSC subsidiary of Italian food company Parmalat. Eurofood featured in the messy investigations into the financial collapse of Parmalat at the start of this year and, all things considered, will not exactly feature at the top of Mr Molony's list of all-time favourite clients.

The experience has led to change at the firm, with McCann FitzGerald no longer prepared to provide its partners as non-executive directors with the same readiness as before. Mr Molony says lawyers' roles in such situations - where the foreign client turns to its Irish counsel to become its required Irish-resident director - will tend to be very limited.

"I don't believe anybody was questioning whether our partner was doing anything wrong," he says of Eurofood, adding that it was a case of "being in the wrong place at the wrong time".

He says the firm has been rethinking the provision of directors for such roles for a while, with new rules on compliance egging this process on. He believes the nature of the non-executive role is too limited in many cases to allow for the kind of responsibility it now requires.