Jim Beresford gained the dubious distinction of being the “highest-earning solicitor in Britain” through the profits generated by his firm’s handling of miners’ compensation claims.

By April this year Beresfords had made more than £140 million from dealing with such claims.

Mr Beresford earned £16.7 million in a single year – equivalent to £45,890 a day – most from handling cases involving men suffering from lung diseases or vibration white finger. Mr Beresford, a director of Doncaster Rovers Football Club, lives with his wife, Linda, in a palatial property in Linton, Wetherby, West Yorkshire.

He has his own £1.8 million Super King Air private turbo-prop aircraft and in the garage there is an Aston Martin and a Ferrari.

His partner, Douglas Smith, has also put the fruits of his earnings into expensive cars, enjoying an Aston Martin DB9 and a Bentley Arnage.

He and his family live in the Grade II-listed Noblethorpe Hall, which has seven bedrooms and four reception rooms, and is set in 18 acres of parkland near Barnsley, South Yorkshire.

Fortune has also smiled on the Beresford family: Esta, a daughter, is a solicitor and one of the firm’s three partners.

She and her husband bought the £470,000 Ingmanthorpe Hall, at Deighton, near Wetherby, in 2002.

This is all a long way from the days when Beresfords’ head office was to be found in a shabby line of redbrick terraced buildings on a drab street in Doncaster, with a Chinese takeaway and Lorraine’s café as near-neighbours.

Those premises have long since been boarded up and sold.

The firm, nowadays a limited liability partnership that trades as Beresfords Solicitors LLP, moved in November of 2003 into a luxurious £4.8 million lakeside development at Quay Point, Doncaster, with 38,000 square feet of glass-fronted space in which to house the partners and their 200 employees.

Last year The Lawyer magazine calculated that Mr Beresford was the highest-earning solicitor in Britain, topping the estimated £13 million that was earned in 2005-06 by Andrew Nulty.

Mr Nulty, 40, is the senior partner at Avalon, based in Warrington, Cheshire, another law firm that has earned huge profits from coal health claims.

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