An audience member who had worked for a Big 4 (un-named) for ten years volunteered the following (I paraphrase):

• We’re global, in far more cities and countries than the most far-flung law firm;
• We’re in, or have immediate entree to, essentially every Fortune 1000, through one or more of the doors of audit, tax, and consulting; our brand could hardly be more widely recognized;
• As a corporation, we not only have the luxury of being able to invest retained earnings, but we can reward our top performers with stock options and not just current ordinary income; and most fascinating and powerful of all
• When we decide to target an industry—be it technology, in San Jose, or autos, in Detroit—we can assign 10,000 professionals for an entire year to build up process maps, workflow diagrams, analytic tools, and so forth, and to build a deep and rich resource in thought leadership; this is not viewed as extraneous or peripheral in the least, but is in fact a standard part of one’s career path. These professionals are then plunged back into client relations in the targeted vertical.

In the opening session of the MPF event itself, data was presented showing—this struck me as not exactly coincidental—that the inflation-adjusted growth in revenue of all private law firms (from solo’s to AmLaw #1) in the US was $300-billion in 2005 and in 2015 was…$300-billion. Meanwhile, the amount spent on legal services provided by not-law-firms, including the amounts spent on inhouse departments, have grown nearly 50% and last year totalled about $137-billion.

Finally, the panel touched upon the topic featured in the agenda’s description: the implications of the UK’s Legal Services Act for North America. Conceptually it seems to me there are three possible views on this:

• Never happen here, so next question (thank you, bars of the 50 states).
• May or may not happen here, but in the meantime the Big 4’s, Axiom’s, Riverview’s, NovusLaw’s, Clutch’s, Integreon’s, LegalZoom’s, et al., of the legal world are scooting right along doing virtually whatever they want to do, or certainly what they need to do, so it’s an academic debate. Or
• Yes, the functional equivalent of the LSA will have to come to North America sooner or later; that’s the way dynamic global markets work. You cannot erect a barrier against talent, ideas, or capital at the water’s edge.

Personally, I subscribe to a blend of ##2 and 3, roughly as follows.

Yes indeed, a lot of #2 is happening already right under our noses, and clients, not so incidentally, seem to be delighted. Particularly in a part of the market beneath the dignity of BigLaw, LegalZoom is loudly and publicly on a mission to create “clients for life,” where a youngish person with perhaps a question about a house closing, a pre-nup, an employment discrimination issue, or a corporate or partnership formation, will start with the automated tools and over time move up into LegalZoom’s standing army of human lawyers. Without question, this provides legal services to a non- or inexcusably under- served portion of the market today.

So, too, #2 is happening with the Big 4 and tax, employment, and immigration law issues.

But #3 would be the headline revolution, and I believe it is inevitably in the cards not just thanks to the dynamics of markets—”don’t fight the tape” is an old Wall Street mantra, but it embeds the identical logical notion that markets will have their way—but also thanks to what we know about the history of social-policy and judicial challenges to guild restrictions on qualifications for entrance and the “unauthorized practice” of X, Y, Z.

First, note that pretty much every successful challenge to guild restrictions has been based on a combination of antitrust, commerce-clause, and free speech. This was true of the 1977 Bates decision permitting lawyer advertising and was the genesis of the UK’s Clementi Commission itself, which led to the LSA. Second, how many of you noted the Supreme Court’s February 2015 decision in North Carolina State Board of Dental Examiners vs. FTC? In summary it upheld the FTC’s challenge to the licensing board’s practice of excluding nondentists from the market for teeth whitening—as anticompetitive and an unfair restraint of trade. Of particular note are these lines:

The Court has rejected the argument that it would be unwise to apply the antitrust laws to professional regulation [absent extenuating circumstances and] particularly in light of the risks licensing boards dominated by market participants may pose to the free market.

So if a challenge to The Rules of Professional Conduct’s prohibition on non-lawyer ownership were either brought by (say) a Big 4, or conversely if an action to prohibit (say) a Big 4 from providing “lawyerly” services were brought by a lawyer or law firm, my money would be on the prohibition falling.

And as an economically trained lawyer, business owner, and New Yorker, my reaction would be: “Bring it on.”