By Karim Eshqoor | Barbarian Law™ | barbarianlaw.ca
Where Art Meets Corporate Interest
Here is a question worth sitting with: if non-lawyer ownership of law firms is truly incompatible with professional independence, how do we explain what the accounting profession has already built in Canada? Through multidisciplinary practices and affiliated law firm structures, accountants have arguably achieved much of the substance of non-lawyer participation in legal services — without the ethical apocalypse the profession long warned about. Perhaps the real question for Canadian law societies is no longer whether to allow non-lawyer involvement, but whether to formalize and regulate what the market appears to have already decided.
The Loophole Is Already the Rule
Every provincial law society in Canada prohibits non-lawyer ownership of law firms and fee-sharing with non-lawyers, in the name of professional independence. Yet look at who is actually delivering legal services in this country.
KPMG Law LLP — the law firm affiliated with KPMG in Canada — operates over 175 lawyers across the country and explicitly rejects the traditional law firm model, delivering legal services as part of “one KPMG” integrated with Audit, Tax, and Advisory. Deloitte rebranded its Canadian-affiliated firm Heddema & Partners LLP as Deloitte Tax Law LLP. EY has assembled its own Canadian legal affiliate. Globally, the Big Four accounting networks employ thousands of practising lawyers, with legal practices spanning dozens of countries — PwC alone had accumulated legal practices in 85 countries by 2015.
Formally, these Canadian affiliates are lawyer-owned entities that comply with law society rules. Functionally, they are the legal service line of a multidisciplinary accounting enterprise. The brand is the accounting firm’s. The client relationships flow through the accounting firm. The referral pipeline, the technology stack, the office space, the global network — all of it belongs to an organization whose partners are overwhelmingly not lawyers. When a legal practice cannot exist independently of the accounting network it serves, the ownership rule protects a fiction, not a principle.
Ontario’s own framework concedes the point. The Law Society of Ontario permits lawyers to form Multi-Discipline Practices with professionals whose work “supports or supplements” the practice of law — accountants chief among them. And the newest wave of structuring goes further: Canadian firms are increasingly separating the regulated legal practice from a management company that owns the brand, technology, and administrative operations — a structure that commentators note brings private equity right up to the edge of the practice without formally touching it. As MLT Aikins observed in a 2026 analysis, the real question is no longer whether outside capital can invest in Canadian law firms, but whether it can invest in the business of delivering legal services without investing in the practice itself. It can. It does.
So the prohibition doesn’t prevent non-lawyer economic participation in legal services. It just forces that participation into indirect, less transparent structures — and reserves the benefits for organizations big enough to afford the structuring fees.
The Economic Case: Capital, Scale, and the Cost of Law
The academic literature on this is not close.
1. The ownership rule is a capital constraint, and capital constraints raise prices. Professor Gillian Hadfield’s foundational paper, The Cost of Law: Promoting Access to Justice Through the (Un)Corporate Practice of Law (International Review of Law & Economics, 2014), argues that the access-to-justice crisis is rooted in law firm economics: the prohibition on corporate practice locks legal services into an artisanal, one-lawyer-at-a-time production model that cannot achieve the economies of scale, standardization, and technology investment that drive down costs in every other industry. A firm that cannot raise equity cannot invest in the systems that make a $2,000 service into a $400 service.
2. The lawyer’s monopoly is among the most restrictive regulatory regimes in the modern economy. Hadfield and Deborah Rhode, in How to Regulate Legal Services to Promote Access, Innovation, and the Quality of Lawyering (Hastings Law Journal, 2016), put it bluntly: existing approaches to regulating the legal profession “increase costs, decrease access, stifle innovation, and do little to protect the interests of those who need or use legal services.” Their argument is not deregulation — it’s better regulation, at the entity level, that preserves professional duties while allowing alternative providers and business structures to deliver higher quality at lower cost. That is precisely the model England and Wales adopted under the Legal Services Act 2007, where the Solicitors Regulation Authority has licensed PwC, KPMG, EY and over a hundred other accounting firms as alternative business structures — with the profession’s core duties fully intact.
3. Succession and legacy economics. For small firms and sole practitioners — the backbone of legal services for ordinary Canadians — the ownership rule destroys enterprise value. A founder cannot sell equity to the office manager who ran the firm for twenty years, cannot pass ownership to non-lawyer heirs, cannot take on an investor to fund growth. The Arizona State Law Journal identifies “legacy ownership” as one of the four core use cases of liberalized structures for exactly this reason. Every other business owner in Canada can monetize what they build. Lawyers must liquidate.
4. Competition disciplines price. Bundled multidisciplinary services reduce transaction costs for clients — one engagement, one relationship, shared overhead. That’s why clients keep pulling the Big Four into legal work despite the rules, and it’s why the Harvard Center on the Legal Profession’s research (Wilkins & Esteban, Law & Social Inquiry, 2018) concluded the accounting networks are structurally positioned to keep winning as the market matures toward integrated business solutions.
We Already Know What Internal Barriers Cost Us — Canada Is the Case Study
Here is the part of this debate that should resonate with every Canadian business owner: we don’t need to speculate about what protectionist internal rules cost an economy. We live it.
Canada is a country where it is famously easier to sell to the world than to our own citizens. In January 2026, the IMF estimated that our interprovincial trade barriers function as an internal tariff of roughly nine per cent — climbing as high as 40 per cent in some service sectors — and that removing them could grow GDP by about seven per cent, roughly $210 billion. The federal government’s own figures peg the potential gain at up to $200 billion, about $5,100 per Canadian. Deloitte’s analysis projects an $881 billion boost in economic output by 2040 if the barriers were phased out. A brewery in Ontario faces friction shipping to Manitoba. A contractor licensed in one province re-qualifies in the next. Thirteen separate licensing regimes govern health-care workers alone.
Legal services sit squarely inside this problem. Lawyers are regulated by thirteen separate provincial and territorial law societies, each with its own rules on firm structure, ownership, and practice entities. A law firm cannot raise outside capital anywhere in the country, cannot easily scale a single operating entity across provincial lines, and cannot combine with the professionals — accountants, planners, brokers — whose work its clients actually need bundled. The IMF specifically flagged services as where the deepest internal barriers live, precisely because services are inputs into nearly everything else. Legal services are an input into every real estate closing, every incorporation, every business sale in this country.
Viewed through that lens, the ban on non-lawyer ownership isn’t a standalone ethics rule. It is one more internal trade barrier in a country already paying dearly for them — a restriction that fragments capital, blocks scale, and raises the price of a service Canadians cannot opt out of. At the exact moment governments across Canada are dismantling interprovincial barriers to grow the domestic economy, the legal profession’s ownership rules deserve the same scrutiny.
Arizona Suggests the Sky Doesn’t Fall
In 2020, the Arizona Supreme Court became the first U.S. jurisdiction to eliminate the ban outright, creating the Alternative Business Structure (ABS) program: non-lawyers may hold economic interests and decision-making authority in firms delivering legal services, effective 2021.
Five years in, the results:
- Scale. Arizona has approved more than 150 ABS applications, and the model is spreading — Washington State’s Supreme Court has approved its own pilot program on non-lawyer ownership.
- The accountants showed up — legally this time. KPMG Law US was granted an ABS licence to practise law in Arizona, the first Big Four entity authorized to deliver legal services in the United States. What Canadian regulation forces into affiliate structures, Arizona simply licenses and supervises.
- Regulation got stronger, not weaker. ABS entities are subject to more stringent oversight than traditional firms: mandatory compliance counsel, entity-level accountability, attorney-independence governance, and regulator feedback loops — Arizona updated its ABS criteria in March 2026 based on program experience. Only licensed lawyers may practise law or give legal advice; ownership and advice remain separate.
- Access improved where it was worst. Commentators reviewing the program’s first years found meaningful gains in the consumer “people law” segment — the exact market the 2019 Arizona task force flagged when it reported that 86% of low-income Americans received inadequate help for their legal problems.
Arizona didn’t abolish professional responsibility. It relocated it from an ownership rule to an accountability framework — which is where it always belonged.
The Independence Objection, Answered
The standard objection is that non-lawyer owners will pressure lawyers to compromise professional judgment. Two responses.
First, the pressure already exists. A lawyer inside a Big Four affiliate, an MSO-managed firm, or any leveraged practice already answers to economic forces beyond the client file. Ownership rules don’t eliminate commercial pressure; they just decline to regulate it directly. Entity-level regulation — the Arizona and UK model — actually addresses it, with compliance officers, firm-wide duties, and licence revocation on the table.
Second, the accountants have been co-delivering with lawyers in Canada for decades under MDP and affiliate structures. If proximity to accounting capital corrupted legal judgment, we would have the disciplinary record to show it. We don’t.
Where Canada Goes From Here
Canadian law societies face a choice between two versions of non-lawyer participation: the current one — indirect, opaque, available only to the deep pocketed Big Four and firms that can afford elaborate MSO structuring — or a licensed, transparent, entity-regulated framework open to every firm, including the small firms and solos who actually serve ordinary Canadians.
I run a flat-fee transactional practice. I know exactly what capital investment in technology, process, and people does to the cost of a real estate closing or an incorporation. The firms best positioned to lower prices for Canadian families and small businesses are the ones the current rules starve of capital — while the accounting giants operate freely through the side door.
Canada is finally having an honest conversation about what internal barriers cost us — in beer, in trucking, in health care licensing. Legal services belong in that conversation. If we’re serious about letting Canadians sell to Canadians, the ownership rules that wall off the legal market deserve a hard look too.
The barbarians aren’t at the gate. They’ve arguably been inside the walls since the nineties, wearing accounting firm lanyards. Maybe it’s time the rulebook caught up with the city.
Karim Eshqoor, BBA, LLB, LLM, is the founder of Barbarian Law® (Karim Eshqoor Law Professional Corporation), a flat-fee transactional law firm in Aurora, Ontario. 350+ closed transactions. $150M+ in aggregate deal volume. This post is commentary, not legal advice.
Sources & Further Reading
- Gillian K. Hadfield, “The Cost of Law: Promoting Access to Justice Through the (Un)Corporate Practice of Law,” International Review of Law & Economics 38 (2014) 43–63.
- Gillian K. Hadfield & Deborah L. Rhode, “How to Regulate Legal Services to Promote Access, Innovation, and the Quality of Lawyering,” Hastings Law Journal 67 (2016) 1191.
- David B. Wilkins & Maria J. Esteban Ferrer, “The Integration of Law into Global Business Solutions: The Rise, Transformation, and Potential Future of the Big Four Accountancy Networks in the Global Legal Services Market,” Law & Social Inquiry 43:3 (2018).
- Arizona State Law Journal, “Arizona’s Alternative Business Structures: Innovation Meets Neighboring Resistance” (Jan. 2026).
- IAALS (Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System), ABS Evaluation Blueprint and “Alternative Business Structures in the U.S.: What We Know and What We Still Need to Learn” (2025).
- MLT Aikins LLP, “Management Services and the Evolution of Private Investment in Canadian Law Firms” (June 2026).
- Law Society of Ontario, Multi-Discipline Practice framework, By-Law 7.
- Legal Services Act 2007 (UK) and SRA ABS licensing of PwC, KPMG, and EY (2014–2016).
- Federico Díez & Yuanchen Yang, IMF report on Canada’s interprovincial trade barriers (January 2026).
- Government of Canada, “Advancing Internal Trade” (internal trade barrier cost estimates).
- Deloitte Canada, “The Case for Free Interprovincial Trade.”
