In announcing its acquisition of alternative legal services provider Riverview Law, global accounting giant EY said the deal gave it a "first-mover advantage" in the legal managed services space.

Surely, more established players in that – such as Axiom, Elevate or UnitedLex – would quibble with that. But Cornelius Grossmann, global head of legal at EY, said the comment was meant to announce it as the first of the major accounting firms to acquire an established legal managed services provider.

"We are the first one to combine such a specialised team with the force of the Big Four," Grossmann said.

For a legal market constantly looking for signs of the Big Four's intrusive intentions, that provides a clue. EY's purchase of Riverview may make it the first Big Four-branded 'New Law' competitor. But it does not expect to be the last. And that has bolstered the belief among legal market analysts and consultants that the Big Four will continue to expand their legal businesses in a way that will, down the line, bring them into competition with Big Law.

"I think this just is, in my mind, another indication that the Big Four are not tippy-toeing around the legal industry as some might hope," said Mark Cohen, CEO of legal business consultancy Legal Mosaic. "But they are continuing to make strategic acquisitions and expand their imprint in various ways."

In acquiring Riverview, EY gets a relatively small company that reported having 93 employees and registered a net loss of about £16,000 for the financial year ending 30 September 2017. Riverview, which until this week was partially owned by DLA Piper, is primarily known for its use of technology that builds dashboards of a company's legal work so it can be handled and tracked more efficiently.

Grossmann said EY's next step would be to scale up Riverview's managed services capabilities to sell them to legal departments across the globe. That offering would be backed up by the 2,200 lawyers that EY has in more than 80 jurisdictions. Those lawyers, however, will mostly continue to provide traditional legal advisory services and not managed services.

"What we want to do with Riverview is enter this as a new business line. We're not changing what our 2,200 lawyers are doing, and we're going to invest in more legal advisory capacity. We have more deals coming on in the next 12 months that will do legal advisory. We also will focus on alternative legal service providers where it makes sense," Grossmann said. "We will hire into Riverview more people to scale up that business and scale up more support in our global delivery centres to support Riverview on the delivery of legal managed services."

In the short term, consultants said EY's acquisition of Riverview means the large corporations who already have a relationship with EY will likely be hearing more about "legal managed services", or the process of a third party handling routine corporate legal matters as efficiently as possible.

Elevate CEO Liam Brown wrote on LinkedIn this week that he had received 327 emails asking about the impact of the deal on his company. But he welcomed the idea of more competition in managed services as a way to more broadly grow the market. Brown said Elevate's third-quarter annualised revenue was $48m, up 25% from a year ago.

"I don't think it will move the needle for EY, but this is another step forward – and a win for customers who will be able to 'one-stop shop' for business of law services from EY, alongside the practice of law and transaction advisory services they offer," Brown wrote.

We do a lot of stuff big law firms seem to be less interested in, and we do a lot of stuff where we don't need a magic circle firm

Riverview states that it sells flat-fee services that can account for 60%-70% of legal departments' "day-in, day-out" work, including commercial contract management, employment matters and intellectual property. On that front, consultants said the EY brand could be seen as a sort of "seal of approval" to lower the individual risks involved with in-house departments hiring new companies to do legal work.

Some observers have applied the term "safe disruptor" to describe EY's brand power in the managed services sector.

"This is an imprimatur that gives the in-house counsel cover so they can try new things and if something fails, EY will fix it. And if their management says, 'what the hell were you thinking?', they have a very strong brand to rely on," said Janet Stanton, a partner at legal business consultancy Adam Smith Esq.

Perhaps the largest long-term question for Big Law is how much of its revenue would be at risk from a larger move among corporations to managed services. Most consultants believe that today's offerings don't threaten Big Law's most profitable service lines, such as big-ticket litigation, M&A deals and other high-profile legal work.

Grossmann said EY does not view the markets it wants to enter as competing for Big Law money. He said the company has "nothing strategic" planned for litigation services and it is not in the "multibillion"-pound markets for M&A transactions and initial public offerings.

"We do a lot of stuff [big law firms] seem to be less interested in, and we do a lot of stuff, frankly, where we probably don't need a magic circle firm or a white-shoe firm to deliver on," Grossmann said.

As an example, Grossmann cited a mid-market transaction where a client wants to buy legal, tax and financial advice from one firm.

"That's the field we're playing and competing in," he said. "Big Law, I don't think they need to be too worried about us. It might be a different segment of the market, but most of their revenue base is not threatened by what we're doing."

Still, large managed services contracts signed with corporate legal departments, such as a number of recently announced deals by UnitedLex, could fundamentally change the way work is handled by outside firms. In-house legal leaders often hail the efficiency and price savings that come with those deals.

"Managed services eats into legacy Big Law business," said William Henderson, a professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law. "I think that the accountants understand this. Getting into contract management is a natural progression of the accounting model. Riverview is very good at this but, frankly, so are the other managed service providers."

DXC Technology, for instance, has said it reduced legal operating costs by 30% since signing a contract in December with UnitedLex that at the time was hailed as the largest legal managed services deal in history. DXC general counsel William Deckelman has said his legal department reduced its headcount by more than 40% and has also reduced outside counsel spend by 20%.

UnitedLex CEO Daniel Reed (pictured) said that EY's announcement did not convince him that the accounting giant had the bandwidth to do deals of a similar scope as UnitedLex, which he said will bring in annual revenue of more than $300m this year.

"It's only interesting in the sense that it just further punctuates that the Big Four are in fact taking a very serious look at legal," Reed said. "The problem the Big Four have is they are audit and big tax companies, and they're not unified companies. So that creates a challenge in legal."

Still, Reed said that EY and other Big Four competitors are building up the capacity to deliver those large-scale solutions down the road. EY and Deloitte have recently expanded their legal operations in Singapore and Hong Kong, while PwC said last year that it would form an affiliated law firm in Washington DC. In June, Deloitte announced that it had acquired part of San Francisco-based immigration law firm Berry Appleman & Leiden.

Those moves are increasingly of interest to Big Law, and lawyers in all corners of the global legal market are likely to continue to take notice of other developments.