KPMG Is Elbowing Its Way Into Practicing Law in the US
January 15, 2025
On Tuesday, KPMG joined four other organizations you’ve never heard of — Veterans Legacy Counsel, Get Right Legal, LLC, Homefront Group, LLC, and Mayfair Legal, LLC — in front of the Arizona Supreme Court’s Committee on Alternative Business Structures to apply for initial licensure as a law factory that allows for non-lawyer ownership of a law practice. The committee is down, now the court just has to approve it and will make a decision on January 28.
“We have been studying the Arizona structure for years and are excited by the opportunity it presents to us,” said tax partner Tom Greenaway to the committee according to Financial Times. “The time is right, given the advances we have made with technology and the maturity of the market.” And with consulting business dried up for like three years now, Tom. You forgot that.
“Our business is big business,” he added.
U.S. Tax Practice Leader – Services Christian Athanasoulas told FT that “a US law licence [sic, Brits amirite] would allow the firm to dramatically increase the services it could sell to companies’ in-house legal departments, not just in Arizona but nationally.”
“Traditional law firms don’t necessarily have a footprint in all 50 states,” he told FT. “When they are thinking about ways to serve clients across the entirety of the US, they can use staffing companies or partner with law firms in other states, and we believe that we will be able to do many of those same things.”
He was careful to mention that legal services would not be sold to audit clients because apparently we’re still doing independence (whew).
So yeah, that’s sure something. The US legal services market is estimated to be an approximately $400 billion business.
Tax & Legal was KPMG’s best service line globally for fiscal 2024 and, in fact, the only service line across all Big 4 firms that came close to double-digit growth (9.9%). Revenue in T&L went from $7.9 billion USD in 2023 to $8.7 billion in 2024.
Big 4 firms have been trying to get their paws on for real legal services that can compete with for real law practices since the 90s and have managed to pull it off across the pond (though it’s not going too great at the moment, for EY anyway). Not just there. This is from a paper called The Reemergence of the Big Four in Law published in Harvard Law’s The Practice in January/February 2016:
[Going Concern]
