Within the past couple of months, Adobe Systems Inc. has taken a less traditional path in handling some of its corporate legal work overseas. The company has shifted some matters away from traditional international and regional law firms and hired one of the Big Four accounting firms to take on this work instead.

What prompted the switch? According to Lisa Konie, senior director of legal operations for Adobe, it was primarily a predictable alternative fee arrangement.

The San Jose-based software giant pays the firm, which Konie declined to name, an annual fixed fee that depends on the country where the work is being done and the services being provided.

“What I don't think a lot of law firms appreciate is that we are held accountable to our CFO,” Konie said. “When I come in and tell my CFO that we have 75 percent accountability with billing I come off looking like a rock star.”

While some companies, like Adobe, are on board with the Big Four, others are hanging back, despite the apparent advantages that these accounting behemoths have over traditional law firms, including more predictable and flexible pricing and Scrooge McDuck-sized bank vaults.

Those who remain hesitant say they're still waiting for the Big Four to prove that they offer a better alternative to the traditional firm model.

Big Four Growth Spurt

And though nonlawyer-owned firms are still restricted in the U.S., those offerings are growing like kudzu across the global legal landscape. They're expanding especially fast in jurisdictions—most notably the U.K. and Asia—where nonlawyer ownership of law firms is allowed.

PricewaterhouseCoopers has a flexible lawyering service that provides legal departments with temporary attorneys. It also has an independent law firm in Washington, D.C., called ILC Legal, which offers a broad spectrum of non-U.S. legal services, from immigration and labor law and employment to tax controversies and dispute resolution.

Meanwhile, Ernst & Young this week announced it had acquired DLA Piper-backed alternative legal services provider Riverview Law, based in the U.K., which provides fixed-fee managed services for in-house teams and legal operations.

Cornelius Grossmann, EY's global law leader, told the Recorder affiliate The American Lawyer, that the “acquisition underlines the position of EY as a leading disruptor of legal services.” The move gave EY a total of more than 2,200 legal practitioners in member firms spanning 81 jurisdictions.

“This is good for the legal industry and clients. Clients are increasingly in need of efficient, flexible service providers of every stripe—accounting, payroll processing, legal—especially for process-heavy work that can be made more efficient (or be outright done) by technology,” Amit Khanna, general counsel of office space startup Knotel, said in an email.

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The purchase of Riverview Law means that EY will now own the managed service provider's manpower and technology, which includes new dashboard and matter tracking capabilities for legal departments and contract management solutions. The acquisition also ramps up the number of lawyers working for EY globally to a total of 2,200 in 81 jurisdictions.

Khanna said in the email that if EY can package Riverview's capabilities with its current services, it will be a “boon for clients.”

“I also think the idea of legal service providers being owned and operated only by lawyers is narrow-minded and dated,” Khanna said, adding that Knotel has actually considered starting or acquiring a captive law firm of its own to service the company's internal legal needs more efficiently.

Connie Brenton, the director of legal operations at NetApp Inc. and CEO of Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), said in an email that this week's EY announcement is merely the “tip of the iceberg.”

“We are no longer talking about what is coming, as these changes have arrived. They are here. Now they are simply growing in scope and in size,” she said. “The total legal available market coupled with the current transformation to how legal services are delivered make[s] the legal industry highly attractive to not only the Big Four but to technology providers, law companies, alternative legal providers as well as to private equity companies and venture capitalists.”

Some GCs Remain Wary of Change

At the moment, it's not clear all of this activity means for legal departments, though it's apparent that the Big Four bring advantages to the table.

Accounting firms have vast resources: Deloitte, EY and PwC all brought in 10 times more revenue in 2017 than Kirkland & Ellis, the top grossing law firm of the Am Law 100. And their foray into the legal market is expected to drive down outside legal costs for companies.

Still, interviews with general counsel, consultants and advisers suggest an overarching sense of hesitancy when it comes to hiring accounting firms for legal services that go beyond basic offerings, such as commodity and transactional work.

As the top lawyer for Chicago-based Archer Daniels Midland Co., Cameron Findlay has often turned to these firms for auditing and other accounting-related services. But he hadn't considered hiring one for real legal work until last month when he met with reps from PwC to hear their pitch.

While Findlay said he was “amazed” by the scope of their services and appreciates “more choices,” he remains lukewarm about whether he'd hire an accounting firm to handle ADM's legal needs: “I don't disagree that I would be wary of using them for litigating, maybe because I'm just old-fashioned,” he said.

“But the world is changing and it's always worth taking a look at some sort of model that you aren't used to,” he added.

Steve Beaver, general counsel and vice president of Benchmark Electronics, a contract manufacturing firm with offices worldwide, said he “wouldn't dismiss the possibility” of hiring the Big Four for legal work.

But then the former Bryan Cave litigator added, “I'm very accustomed to large, international law firms and working with them in the overseas market. Right now my instinct is to always go with those large law firms. It will take a while for me to think or adapt to the Big Four in those areas.”

Hammers vs. Swiss Army Knives

Wariness of the Big Four as nontraditional legal service providers is common among general counsel, according to Susan Hackett, CEO of law practice management consulting business Legal Executive Leadership in Chevy Chase, Maryland. She said in-house lawyers typically hail from law firms and might be blind to the advantages of the Big Four.

“All the stuff that lawyers are currently struggling to figure out how to do, the folks in the Big Four have been doing for decades,” Hackett added. “They'll give you a bid. They don't just work hourly and tell you how much after they've finished the project.”

She likened traditional law firms to hammers that pound away at a company's problem from a legal perspective. Big Four firms, it seems, are more like Swiss Army knives with an array of blades tailored to specific situations.

“For corporate clients, it's not just a legal answer. It's a business answer,” she said. “A lot of lawyers and law firms don't look at that broader or holistic view.”

Accounting firms are mostly doing transactional and compliance work in the legal realm, according to Hackett, but she expects that their practice areas will “start to bleed into the kinds of services that are more traditional to law.”

And as the Big Four recruit high-level partners from large law firms, which has begun to happen in Asia and elsewhere, corporations may feel more confident calling up those firms to solve their legal problems.

“If there's a migration from law firms to accounting firms, [the Big Four would] definitely be competitive,” said Ed Ryan, former general counsel of Marriott International Inc.

But Is It for Real?

While the Big Four are creating plenty of buzz as potential disruptors, Jason Winmill, managing partner at legal department consulting firm Argopoint in Boston, suggested that, at least at this point, there's more hype than substance.

“The Big Four has had a presence in the legal services industry and has had an ongoing and respected presence in the legal industry,” he said. “That said, none of my in-house Fortune 500 clients are clamoring to hear about these particular new offerings at this point.”

Winmill added that accounting firms moving into international legal services is a “natural next step,” but one that is “very incremental “ and “not, in my view, revolutionary.”

Giant accounting firms have global reach, name recognition and plenty of money, but they could still face roadblocks, namely regulatory issues in the U.S. and concerns about conflicts.

After all, the Big Four will likely be competing against the law firms that they have audited—and working with clients that they also might have audited, said Steve Poor, who serves as an adviser to Chicago-based law firm Seyfarth Shaw.

“It's not blue ocean for them,” he said. “They've got their own headwinds.”