In September last year, Juri-Avenir, the French association set up in 1992 by the big five accountants’ tied law firms to represent their interests, disbanded. A few months later, KPMG’s tied law firm in Germany, KPMG Beiten Burkhardt, voted to drop KPMG from its title in a move that was calculated to distance the firm from its accountancy parent. Then, in January this year, in a highly symbolic move, PricewaterhouseCoopers’ legal arm, Landwell, spun off its highly profitable tax litigation team to the London office of US firm Dorsey & Whitney.
Taken together, these three events symbolise the severe regulatory pressure being exerted on the accountancy-tied firms across the world. Of the three, Landwell’s decision to offload its tax litigation team is perhaps the most significant. In the years to come, it may come to be regarded as the point at which the accountancy-tied firms finally gave up the fight to become top-tier legal players.
