Mayer Brown has offered its incoming London trainees the option to defer their training contracts in exchange for a one-off payment of £10,000, with three agreeing to postpone their start date by 12 months.

The US firm’s London arm, which takes on between 20 and 25 trainees per year across two intakes in March and September, asked a total of 47 future trainees across four intakes to defer by a year due to business activity levels.