David B. Wilkins on KPMG’s expansion of legal services

news January 14, 2025
Bloomberg; Reuters

KPMG, the Big Four accounting firm, announced its plans to expand legal services in the United States; they plan to open an office in Arizona, which has a more open regulatory framework for non-lawyer ownership of legal services. We have previously written about such regulatory sandboxes in The Practice.

David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the HLS Center on the Legal Profession, spoke to both Reuters and Bloomberg Law. He told Reuters, “‘The Big Four are going to be very good at providing certain kinds of legal services that the traditional law firms have typically in the U.S. had a monopoly on,’ such as integrating law, project management and technology.”

After Arizona’s Supreme Court preliminarily granted approval to KPMG, Professor Wilkins told Bloomberg: “This is a natural extension of what they’ve been trying to do for the past decade or more…They went from trying to be like law firms but bigger to pushing a multidisciplinary model that is tech-enabled.”