Edward’s Gibson quoted in Law Society Gazette article on the Big 4’s legal struggle
We’re delighted that Edwards Gibson Director, Scott Gibson, has been quoted in the Law Society’s article “Four of a kind” by Katherine Freeland.
The Big Four accountancy firms once looked poised to disrupt the legal market. In 2023, Deloitte, PwC, EY and KPMG were aggressively hiring partners and investing in technology, aiming to carve out a share of lucrative corporate legal work. Fast forward to 2025, and the picture is starkly different. Economic headwinds, cultural clashes and structural conflicts have stalled their advance – and our numbers tell the story.
Scott Gibson noted how that ‘Between 2019 and 2024, the Big Four’s combined legal divisions hired 35 partners in London. Against this, the quartet lost 40 serving partners – including two-thirds of the laterals who joined during that time – to rival law firms,’. These figures exclude the Kemp Little acquisition.
In fact, our data shows that in 2024 the Big Four collectively announced just one partner hire in London: a construction specialist moving from DLA Piper to KPMG.
What should have been a seamless marriage of multidisciplinary services has instead exposed deep fault lines. Commercial and legal conflicts remain a major obstacle, with audit-related restrictions frequently “conflicting out” high-value mandates. But culture is proving just as problematic. Lawyers joining the Big Four often lose their client base and their status as ‘partner’, becoming ‘directors’ or ‘principals’. Pay, while competitive by corporate standards, rarely matches private practice.
As Gibson notes, none of this is helped by a reputation for a patronising attitude towards lawyers, who are used to being ‘king of the hill’ in traditional partnership hierarchies.
For now, the Big Four are regrouping, assessing losses and exploring new models – including tech-heavy legal managed services and US expansion via alternative business structures. Yet as suggested in the article, as private equity-backed accountancy networks emerge without the regulatory handcuffs that constrain the Big Four, the real threat to traditional law firms may come from elsewhere.
Read the full Law Society Gazette article here.
Read our article on the fall of the Big Four in law here.