Washington D.C. is the latest jurisdiction to look at whether the rules surrounding law firm ownership should be changed.
Bloombergs report that DC’s bar is to look at alternatives to the present law firm ownership rules, saying it will look at the evolving legal service delivery models, which includes non-lawyer ownership of law firms.
Bar members will have the opportunity to express their views on proposed changes, which would involve fee-sharing and other “alternative business structures” might prove beneficial to firms and their clients.
Such changes have been supported by access to justice advocates across the country who seek more affordable options for Americans seeking legal help. But opponents of rule changes have expressed concerns, including about threats posed to attorney independence and legal ethics, Bloomberg Big Law Business report.
Changes to law firm ownership have already been examined in Arizona, California, and Utah, as well as Chicago, which for the last several months have been weighing similar changes.
Many proposed changes involve modifying Bar Rule 5.4 and its strict limits on law firm ownership.
Andrew Perlman, dean of Suffolk Law School in Boston, said in a written statement that the D.C. Bar announcement is “an encouraging development.”
“Decades ago, D.C. became a leader in this area, and D.C. has the opportunity once again to play a leadership role,” he said.
Big Four Interest
The possibility of changes to the ownership of law firms will be particularly interesting for the Big Four accountancies.
Law firm leaders have noted that the Big Four and other alternative legal service providers, all of whom are already mounting significant competition to traditional law firm services, could take advantage of such a change by opening new legal operations that compete more directly with law firms.
D.C.’s version of Rule 5.4 is already slightly less restrictive than the American Bar Association’s Model Rule 5.4 that most states have adopted, which forbids partnerships between lawyers and nonlawyers if any of the activities of the partnership consist of the practice of law.
Recent Posts on LawFuel
- Second Office Romance Report Deepens Wachtell’s Extraordinary Week
- Shock Move Sees Wachtell Litigation Stars Walk to Rival
- Trump DOJ Subpoenas 14 Big Law Firms in ABA ‘Intimidation’ Fight
- Linklaters Smashes Record as Aggressive US Expansion Pushes to Unprecedented FY26 Heights
- Freshfields Cut Its European Partners. Its New York Partners Got A Raise.Freshfields’ US growth ambitions has forced out equity partners across London, Paris and Germany, the Financial Times reported on 13 July, weeks after a pay overhaul left dozens of its roughly 500 partners holding fewer equity points. Freshfields reset its internal exchange rate from $1.60 to the pound down to about $1.30, then handed extra points to its top US earners so their dollar pay held. Points are a share of a fixed pool and Freshfields’ European partners are the pool. The Financial Times reported this week that Freshfields has culled equity partners in recent weeks, with its London headquarters and its Paris and German offices all seeing exits and equity downgrades. City AM ran it as a shake-up to fund the American push, which it is. What neither write-up reached is the ledger entry that explains it, and that ledger entry has been sitting in public since March. Log in to read . . .
- The Judge’s Brutal Verdict on the Lawyering Behind Harry’s £50m Mail Disaster
- How Trump Turned Big Law Lobbying Into A Billion‑Dollar Profit EngineWhen Donald Trump turned Washington into a rolling policy experiment, most law firms braced for chaos, but a handful quietly built something else: – a brand new profit engine. Lobbying and government‑relations work, once treated as a sideline for politically connected partners, has become one of Big Law’s fastest‑growing business and a new career path for lawyers from DC to Westminster The Trump‑Era Shock For decades, lobbying has sat on the fringes of large law firms and what they traditionally do. There were always a few partners with good contacts, intermittent mandates, and work that was important but they were rarely central to the firm’s story and what the firm really ‘did’. Log in to read . . .
- What Does the KPMG Scandal Means for Law Firms and Internal Investigations
- Kennedy’s Report 12th Year of Growth As The Firm Moves Towards Its $1 Billion Target
- The OpenAI Defense: Inside the Wachtell Trial Team That Just Beat Elon MuskWhile Elon Musk’s legal team tried to transform a federal courtroom in Oakland, California into an existential debate about the fate of human civilization and a “stolen charity,” Sam Altman’s defenders quietly built a procedural guillotine. A unanimous nine-member federal advisory jury took less than two hours to reject all of Musk’s claims against OpenAI, CEO Sam Altman, and President Greg Brockman, which presumably was both surprising and disappointing for the multi-billionaire. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers immediately adopted the verdict from the bench, dismissing the case in full. The same statute-of-limitations finding wiped out Musk’s aiding-and-abetting claim against Microsoft, an early backer of OpenAI’s for-profit arm. Log in to the the lawyer profiles . . .
