Private equity has bought hundreds of accounting and law firms since 2021 and sold almost none of them. Every one of those funds has to sell eventually. So, to whom?
The numbers first. By IFAC's count, fewer than 200 direct PE investments in accounting firms have led to nearly 900 follow-on acquisitions over the past decade... more than 1,000 firms touched in total, with most of the activity since 2022. The wave started properly in 2021, when TowerBrook took a stake in EisnerAmper and New Mountain bought into Citrin Cooperman, and law is now following. The model is always the same... buy one decent firm, then buy its smaller rivals and fold them in, the thing the industry calls a roll-up. In the UK, close to £1.2 billion went into the legal sector in the five years to 2024.
The exits so far
Very few have sold. That is partly timing... most of these firms were bought after 2021 and funds tend to hold for five or six years... but the few that have tried tell you something about what an exit looks like.
The one accounting exit everyone cites is Citrin Cooperman. New Mountain bought in during 2021 at a reported 11 times EBITDA, when the firm was around $315 million in revenue. In January 2025 a Blackstone-led group bought in at a reported 15 times, with revenue heading past $850 million and the firm valued at roughly $2 billion, and New Mountain took its money off the table. Four times the money in three years. It has been the reference deal for every pitch since.
The other pioneer went a different way. TowerBrook's 2021 investment in EisnerAmper was the first PE deal with a top-20 firm. In March 2026 it exited through what the industry calls a continuation vehicle... the fund sold the firm to a new fund run by the same people. The old investors got paid out by new ones. The firm itself never changed hands.
Legal is thinner still. A trade press review this spring put it plainly... "so far, there have been very few PE exits." Livingbridge selling Stowe Family Law to Investcorp in late 2024 is one of the only completed ones. Fletchers, bought by Sun Capital in 2021, was extended in February through the same continuation-vehicle route for another four or five years.
So the scorecard after half a decade is one headline flip, two funds selling to themselves, and a handful of smaller trades. Meanwhile average holding periods for UK buyouts have drifted out to around six years, which means the firms bought in 2021 and 2022 are coming up for sale now, in volume, at the same time.
Two buyers, one firm
The playbook that bought them is old and simple. Buy a firm, add partners, bill more hours, bolt on rivals, exit to a bigger fund at a bigger multiple. The entire case rests on adding people. The plan is always some version of fifty more partners in two years.
A second buyer has arrived with the opposite thesis. Current, backed by Thrive, has committed $500 million to buying accounting firms. Multiplier, Modus and General Catalyst's vehicles are doing versions of the same thing. They buy the firm for its client book and its licence-holders, then rebuild the production around software. Even at the small end the claims are striking... Minerva, a YC-backed startup that bought a single practice, says it took the operating margin from 5% to 70%. Nobody in that camp is hiring fifty partners. The whole point is not needing to.
These two buyers cannot both be right about what the asset is. One believes it bought a machine that converts people into hours. The other believes it bought a set of client relationships with an expensive production department attached, and that the department is optional.
And the second buyer is the one likely to be sitting across the table when the first comes to sell. The natural acquirer of a firm bought in 2021 is not another fund running the 2021 playbook... those funds are trying to sell too. Price the firm the way the second buyer prices it and it splits into three parts. The client relationships keep their value. The licence-holders keep theirs, because in most of the United States an audit firm has to be owned by CPAs, and partners with signatures cannot be automated. The layer in between... the associates, senior associates and managers hired to fill the pyramid... is exactly what the second buyer plans to replace. That layer is the seller's entire growth story, and it is the first thing the buyer intends to cut.
So you get two valuations of the same firm that don't meet. One prices the people. The other prices the clients and the signatures, and treats the people as a cost to bring down. The next two years of deals in this market get argued out inside that gap.
What I think happens next
The first group's exits get harder from here. Some of the bigger firms will find a fund still willing to run the old playbook for a while... Blackstone did that with Citrin, and there will be others. But funds selling to themselves becomes the default rather than the exception, because when the buyer you expected values your asset differently, the easiest thing to do is not sell yet.
A few of the strongest firms convert themselves into the second kind of buyer before they go to market. It's the right move, and a brutal one to explain, because it means telling your own investors that the growth story you sold them, the partners you hired, is now the thing you are cutting.
And the number people quote changes... revenue per licence-holder instead of revenue per head, because that's what the second buyer is actually paying for.
If you own an accounting or law firm and are thinking about selling, or you're looking to buy one, I'd like to talk. Eilla advises on exactly these deals.
Which buyer do you think wins these firms when they come to market... the fund with more capital, or the one that needs fewer people? Hit reply, I read everything, and the sharpest replies shape the next edition.
See you next time.