DEALS worth a record £95m have been completed by the corporate department of commercial lawyers Denison Till in the past year, which is £5m more than in 2004.

Most of the deals were from handling share acquisitions, disposals and management buyouts and buy-ins for companies in York and North and West Yorkshire.

Six of the deals were valued at more than £5m and five were between £2m and £5m, with the rest being worth up to £2m.

The department's 180 instructions also included a number of IT and intellectual property-related commercial agreements, e-commerce contracts, franchising, company reorganisations and shareholder disputes.

The commercial highlights included acting for the management of Pivotal Laboratories, in York, in the £8m acquisition of the business, which carries out central laboratory testing in clinical trials, and acting for newly-launched Real Simulation, in the acquisition of Yorkshire Flight Centre, in Harrogate, North Yorkshire.

Denison Till's corporate department is the largest of its kind in York and North Yorkshire, and handles work for Shepherd Building Group, the University of York, Jarvis, Flamingoland and the National Railway Museum.

Andrew Lindsay, head of the commercial department and president of York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce, said: "The volume and nature of the work, which included a steady stream of cross-border transactions, shows that business confidence in York and North Yorkshire was strong throughout the year in spite of a predicted fall in commercial activity."