為什麼四大會計師事務所都在進軍法律市場？

11-16

綠舟網上的兩則資訊，看不太明白為什麼會計師事務所要進入法律市場？

個人淺見，從律所的角度簡單分析下四大的幾點優勢：

1、與中資律所相比天然的品牌和資源優勢

之前 @肥肥貓回答過一篇帖子「律師事務所的核心競爭力是什麼？」裡面提到，」知名國際大所在各行各業積攢下了的深厚的資源，這種資源不以合伙人本人和客戶高層的私人關係為轉移「，而這一點，恰恰是四大能做到的，通過其原有審計和稅務的知名度和專業度擴展到法律領域，所積累的豐富客戶資源和信任度（大部分是外資客戶），這是已經在國內發展數十年的中資律所都較難超越的。據我所知，四大中某新組建的律所，加入的合伙人帶來的業務佔比很少，大部分是審計或稅務部門介紹的的國外客戶，報價不低（按四大審計或稅務收費標準，基本等同於外資律所收費），且根本不擔心沒有案源。

2、與外資律所相比可執業的優越性

外資律所的律師是不能執業的，這點大家都知道，但四大的律所實際上是獨立於四大的，由國內自然人作為合伙人所組建的律所，是的，其實質是中資律所，且有其中文登記註冊名稱。所以可以掛證、可以執業，可以出法律意見，甚至可以應訴，但對外在客戶看來，是四大旗下的律所，是不是有一種開外掛的感覺？

其他答案里提到的複合型、跨領域、全方位為客戶提供服務等觀點就不再贅述了，總體而言感覺四大設立律所比起苦苦在中資所多年打拚積攢客戶而言是有壓倒性優勢的，但長期來看，還是取決於其內部整合及提供服務的質量是否能為客戶所滿意。

個人認知謹作分享，歡迎大家探討（註：法律僅涉及非訴服務）：

行業特性部分。
法律服務和四大的服務（審計、稅務、財務諮詢）有很大的相似性和關聯性：提供服務需要專業資質；服務基礎是商業交易，都只涉及交易的一個側面，但相互關聯緊密、互有倚賴；專業素養是服務的基礎，服務經驗和行業經驗是服務質量差異化的重要因素；作為外部客戶事先難以有效評估服務質量，過往交易經驗和口碑聲譽非常重要；優質客戶群具有很高的相似性和重合度等等。
基於以上特點，其實律所和會計師事務所之間是很適合縱向兼并的情形。
客戶需求部分。
個人感受，最近這幾年隨著經濟形勢變化，客戶對於專業服務的價格越趨敏感，對於增值服務的要求同時增加。由此導致，傳統業務模式的競爭力都在下滑，對各個中介機構的壓力也是越來越大。
基於此，律所和會計師事務所合併，對雙方都是擴大客戶基礎、提高服務附加值並提升競爭力的措施。
經濟原因。
就個人觀察，市場條件不好時，往往是兼并/合併旺盛期，無論目的是逆勢提升、鞏固地位還是抱團取暖。目前的宏觀經濟態勢其實也算是促生這種合併的契機。

進軍法律的原因很容易理解，四大的業務很多跟法律業務重合，把蛋糕做大嘛。

我覺得進軍法律的後果更值得關注。四大過去幾十年進軍了諮詢業。非審計業務佔四大業務的比例越來越大，對於有些公司（說的就是德勤），諮詢帶來的收益甚至要超過審計。

學界和業界最擔心的是conflict of interest （利益衝突）。當四大為了拉攏諮詢業務（以及法律業務），會不會影響他在審計業務中的中立性？會不會影響審計質量？如果會的話怎麼進行監管？這是一個大家都還沒有解決的問題。

就算是個人，複合型人才是最受歡迎的。
論及公司，組合型業務是最被看好的，尤其是其中翹楚的組合。
財務+法律領域的頂尖人才所做的風險識別、控制，可以說能覆蓋一般公司的80%風險源。起碼我們公司是這樣的。可見市場潛力。
我挺看好的。也覺得這樣的改變是迎合了我們的市場的。我國和歐美不一樣，企業性質構成多樣化，其中佔據大頭的那部分公司，其最大最被關注的風險源就是財務，所以財務配合法律，簡直是再好不過了。

對四大來說是肥水不流外人田,對客戶來說是每分錢都物盡其用。客戶不想看到四大回復的郵件里說「以上是我們的審計/稅務/會計意見，內部涵蓋的相關法律問題請詳細諮詢律師」，也不希望看到律師回復的郵件里說「以上是我們的法律意見，相關會計審計問題請詳細諮詢會計事務所」。客戶會覺得很麻煩啊，我花了這筆錢你竟然都不能給我說出個所以然來。如果一份意見書裡面全部需要的專業知識都有了，豈不是很屌。客戶也會交口稱讚，一傳十十傳百，四大就secure了大多數客戶源。That being said,這條路不一定適合所有會計師事務所，也就是四大能整這事兒。Local的會計師事務所如果說自己也能提供專業的法律意見，客戶不一定買帳，因為專業性有待考量——說到底就是四大的牌子很響亮，客戶信賴度高。
有一個關鍵的問題尚待解決，就是審計和法律的相互獨立性。坐等大神們對於該問題的意見和探討。

絕大多數項目都是會計師事務所和律所一起上的，國內不少律所都是吃這碗飯的。

四大要是都有了律所，絕大多數項目就可以自己包圓了……就這個原因。

國內的律所們，要加油啊！

你看看多少學法律的到最後考了CPA就知道了……

樓上說法律和審計可以一站式服務的都可以轟出去了。兩個最需要獨立性的機構提供一站式服務，這個比四大同時向一家企業提供審計和諮詢服務更可怕。瑛明加入安永，安永是為此丟了審計客戶的。

但是除了審計服務，稅務，併購，諮詢這些都是可以和法律服務相結合的。說白了，未來始終是四大的，無論是律所還是諮詢公司，在經營網路如蜘蛛網一般的四大面前，都只有等著被收購的份。

大概就像天天去光顧的煎餅果子店某天同時賣起了豆漿？
會計師事務所和律師事務所的客戶群體重疊的挺厲害的，早先就一直為你提供有品質保障的審計服務，再往你這兜售法律服務的話還是有點公關優勢的吧。
純個人感受，說的不對盡情指教。。。

違法給你帖一篇吧Professional services Attack of the bean-counters
Lawyers beware: the accountants are coming after your businessMar 21st 2015 | From the print edition

CONSULTING has its Big Three; accounting the Big Four; and executive search a Big Five. But there is no corresponding clutch of dominant law firms. None has amassed as much as 0.5% of an industry with global revenues of around $650 billion a year. Even the biggest law firms may be anachronistically inefficient. They are run by lawyers, not professional managers, insist on charging by the 「billable hour」 rather than by results and use little technology more advanced than e-mail. Nonetheless, most big law firms have continued to be highly profitable.

In recent years, clients have begun to rebel against the billable hour, and at being charged senior lawyers』 rates for work done by juniors. Some have started sending basic legal paperwork to cheap, offshore processing centres. But only now is a serious threat to the law firms』 cosy existence emerging.

In this section

Attack of the bean-counters
The autumn of Sumner
A Saudi saga
Under the hammer
The business of business

Reprints

It comes from none other than the Big Four accounting networks (Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC), whose combined annual revenues of $120 billion exceed the $89 billion generated by the 100 largest law firms combined (see charts). Having already dipped a toe into the legal business a couple of decades ago, only to retreat, the accountants have been stealthily building up legal-services divisions. These have now reached a size where they outgun most law firms: by headcount, PwC』s legal arm is the world』s tenth-biggest, and all four networks』 law divisions are in the top 40 by this measure.

The accountants insist that they do not want to compete with law firms, and that legal services will remain a small chunk of their revenues in the medium term. So far, they have focused on mid-tier, process-oriented work rather than the big deals and lawsuits that elite law firms chase. Moreover, regulation has restricted their growth: they cannot practise law in America, which accounts for over a third of global legal spending, and most European countries restrict their freedom to do so. Only a few countries allow full integration of accounting and law firms (see table).

Nonetheless, as the accountants run out of room to grow in other businesses, they will have trouble resisting this inefficient and lucrative market. And the law firms will find it hard to fend them off. To Michael Roch of Kerma Partners, an outfit that advises professional-services firms, the Big Four are 「the biggest underestimated threat to the legal profession today」.

The idea of accounting firms doing legal work is hardly new. The Big Four have long employed lawyers to work on European clients』 tax returns. In the 1990s the then Big Five, led by the late, unlamented Arthur Andersen, sought to diversify from auditing and tax by expanding into both consulting and law. With America off-limits, all but Deloitte founded or acquired law firms in Britain.

That trend ended abruptly when the Enron scandal took down Andersen in 2002. Garretts, an English legal practice it had affiliated with, suffered a harrowing dissolution, in which its staff had to find new jobs and its partners faced personal bankruptcy. Observers attributed Andersen』s demise to conflicts of interest between its consulting and audit arms. The accountants』 legal divisions were seen as presenting similar risks. Moreover, the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate-governance reform America passed in the wake of the scandal transformed the business environment for the surviving Big Four. Besides restricting the auxiliary services they could offer to audit clients, it granted them a windfall in new regulatory work. In response, the accountants mostly closed or sold their non-tax legal practices.

Over the following decade, however, incentives increased for the firms to revisit their abandoned experiment. Revenues in their audit and tax divisions flatlined, forcing them to seek new business lines to keep growing. As their corporate clients globalised, the Big Four』s international scale—together, they employ about 700,000 people in more than 150 countries—became an increasingly valuable selling-point.

The recession following the 2008 financial crisis prompted businesses』 general counsels to rebel against the padded bills they get from the law firms they use. In the same decade, several countries passed laws opening up their legal industries. Britain and Australia authorised 「multidisciplinary practices」 (MDPs), which let attorneys share profits, without restriction, with members of other professions. So, the Big Four moved back in, buying small law firms, poaching partners from others and recruiting on campuses. With the flexibility to offer discounted, fixed fees, they started to win lots of corporate legal work. In recent years the quartet』s combined legal revenues have grown at double-digit rates.

Since 2013 EY Legal has expanded from 23 countries to 64. It merged with a Chinese law firm, Chen Co, and hired a partner from Freshfields, one of the 「Magic Circle」 of posh London solicitors. In 2012 Deloitte scooped up Raupach Wollert-Elmendorff in Germany, while PwC recently took over an immigration-law boutique, Bomza, in Canada. KPMG was the first of the four to register an MDP in Britain, which lets it give its lawyers there full-fledged partnerships in the firm. Now, as a proportion of the combined revenues of the ten largest firms in each country, Kerma Partners calculates that the Big Four』s aggregate market penetration ranges from 4% in China and 6% in Britain to 20% in Germany and 30% in Spain.

The Big Four are taking a more focused approach this time. Rather than building full-service firms, they are concentrating on areas of law that complement their existing services: immigration, which sits nicely with expatriate tax work; labour, which goes with human-resources consulting; compliance; commercial contracts; and due diligence. So far they have resisted taking on the priciest law firms for high-value work on capital-markets transactions or mergers and acquisitions. They are also steering clear of non-tax litigation, which could result in them suing potential audit or consulting clients. But they are seeking to build broader practices in under-lawyered emerging markets where the international law firms do not have a presence but the accountants do.

Kill billable hours

For now the Big Four seem content with stealthy growth. By tiptoeing around the strongest firms, they have planted a flag on the margins of the profession without setting off alarms. 「I don』t think we disrupt the existing law business that much,」 says Leon Flavell, the head of PwC Legal. But his goal is to more than double its revenues by 2020, to $1 billion a year. The legal business is not growing fast enough for PwC and the other three accounting giants to reach this sort of turnover unnoticed. Eventually, they will go head-to-head with law firms.

So far, law firms have been sanguine about this looming risk. Those in America can afford to be complacent: the accountants』 lobbyists are too busy advancing the interests of their existing businesses to push for an opening of the legal profession. Even if they tried, America』s legislative bodies are infested with lawyers, who would surely fight back. This should ensure that the market remains protected for the foreseeable future. Similarly, the Magic Circle firms in London can rest easy for now: Europe』s finest lawyers can still name their price for the most challenging, 「bet-the-company」 work.

Those most at risk from the attack of the bean-counters are the profusion of mid-tier legal firms in liberalised markets. Since their profit margins are already low, they cannot afford even a modest loss of market share. Unfortunately for them, much of their business is high-volume, repetitive tasks—just the sort of work that the Big Four excel at standardising and automating.

Most of these vulnerable law firms have been slow to react. That may be because their clients are telling them not to worry: in a recent survey by American Lawyer magazine, 90% of companies』 general counsels did not think their business would buy legal advice from an accounting network. However, those general counsels may themselves be cut out of the loop, as the Big Four sell their companies』 finance departments a 「one-stop shop」 service, with legal work bundled together with consulting and tax filing.

A handful of innovative law firms have tried to 「self-disrupt」, to pre-empt new entrants. In 2011 Allen Overy, a Magic Circle member, set up a service centre in Belfast to handle routine aspects of big deals. It now employs almost 400 people there, including 70 lawyers, at a fraction of London salaries and rent. At the other end of the market, in recent years groups of mid-tier firms across the globe have linked up to form loosely integrated networks. In January Dacheng of China joined a Western confederation, Dentons, to create an alliance that employs 6,600 attorneys.

Although the giants of the legal world have sought to mimic the accountants』 cost and scale advantages, they remain minnows compared with the Big Four. Only the likes of PwC and Deloitte can muster the capital and technology (and relatively cheap labour) to industrialise the artisanal model of legal practice that has endured so long. Businesses that spend heavily on legal advice stand to save a fortune. But law firms that are sub-scale and inefficient risk ruin. The Walmarts and Amazons of professional services are at their gates, and the legal industry』s halting pace of creative destruction is set to accelerate as a result.

From the print edition: Business

國內本土會計事務所不斷蠶食四大業務，市場利潤

四大必須開拓新的領域市場。

作為insider一枚，我必須說安永並非併購瑛明，而只是network！

可能題主理解錯了，四大早就有自己的法律服務部門了。這不是一個從無到有的問題，而是一個擴大市場佔有率的問題。就拿普華永道來說，它有自己的法律部門，早在消息出來之前，已經在多個國家分布了自己兩千多個律師。只是它的戰略要延伸，要擴大規模，主要包括移民服務、企業治理、跨國就業、國際業務重組等方面。把觸手伸向未來有潛力的市場，分一塊未來的蛋糕。

很簡單，法律和會計，審計，有不小的重合面積，你能想像一個會計師不懂經濟法和稅法嗎？

所以，不能說是進軍，實際上是擴大，本身他們就是法律操作者的一員

1 整合優勢資源因為都是服務業且有諸多重合領域
2 中國特色的法律行業中端市場還是跟菜市場一樣充分遵循市場經濟的無論是訴訟還是非訴業務賣白菜也是賣賣蘿蔔也是賣
3 利用自身資源投資包裝等待升值。
4 一個業務給誰都是做肥水不流外人田。

一是對資本市場未來的發展有著比較好的市場預期吧。公司上市需要會計師和律師的專業意見，兩種資源整合後能提供更協調更全面更便捷的服務。
再一個十八大三中全會改革公報里提要放開一些市場、建設法治中國、普遍建立法律顧問制度，這都預示著法律服務市場未來可能會有一個大的發展。

現在法律代理這一塊是比比較零星的散戶模式，主要依靠個人名氣，很少有把事務所打造成品牌的，四大藉助前期品牌效應，以此為跳板，對法律業務和事務所品牌打造上有個先天的優勢

審計和法律本來就是密不可分的強強聯手是不是大勢所趨嗎將兩家公司的資源進行整合共同牟取更大利潤吧應該是醬紫哈哈

明顯四大掌握的渠道比很多律所牛逼多了

同理，律所也可以進軍會計/財務市場！