The reemergence of the Big Four in Law: Their rise, transformation and potential triumph

Throughout the 1990s, the Big Five accounting firms -Arthur Andersen, KPMG, Ernst & Young (EY), PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), and Deloitte- made a concerted effort to enter the legal services market. This effort was particularly pronounced -and particularly successful- in Europe. By the close of the twentieth Century, legal networks that were directly owned or closely affiliated with the Big Five were major players in many markets around the world, and were threatening to enter markets in which they were still barred, such as in the United States. However, after the wave of accounting scandals that arose out of the 2001 financial crises, most observers concluded that the accounting firms' legal networks were effectively dead. As a result, both practitioners and academics stopped paying attention to what these firms were doing in law.