In the late 1990s, our profession was presented with yet another challenge to its well-being (and that of the public it serves) in the form of a threatened invasion by what was then the “Big Five” public accounting firms. In countries that permitted lawyers to practice with non-lawyers, those firms had begun to incorporate legal services into the portfolio of accounting, auditing and consulting services they already offered. They touted the “one-stop shopping” they could then offer to their corporate clients through their new “multi-disciplinary practices,” and apparently business consumers of legal services found that attractive.
By 2011, KPMG and PwC were the eighth and ninth largest “law firms” in the world, and they, and their sister firms, were preparing to take their new concept to the United States with an aggressive campaign to change the rules prohibiting such practices here. But then came the Enron scandal, which lead to the demise of Arthur Andersen, the largest of the Big Five; remedial legislation to tame the accounting profession; and a pull-back from their plan to bring the multi-disciplinary practice concept to this county.
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