CPE & Event Calendar

For decades, the legal profession assumed it was insulated from private equity's reach - unauthorized practice of law rules, ownership restrictions, and ethical constraints seemed to make lawyers, accountants, and physicians poor candidates for the roll-up playbook that transformed dental, veterinary, and physical therapy practices. That assumption is being tested. PE sponsors have identified professional services organizations as attractive targets: recurring revenue, fragmented markets ripe for consolidation, and increasingly workflows where AI-driven automation promises to compress costs and multiply margins in ways that make even highly regulated, labor-intensive practices financially compelling. But these aren't standard buyouts. Structuring an acquisition of a law, accounting, or medical practice requires navigating a patchwork of state-specific restrictions on non-lawyer ownership, fee-splitting prohibitions, and licensure requirements often through management services organization (MSO) structures or friendly-PC arrangements designed to separate clinical/professional judgment from the capital and control PE investors expect. Jurisdictions like Massachusetts add another layer of complexity: the state's near-total unenforceability of non-competition agreements for physicians (and significant limits for other professionals) undermines a tool PE buyers typically rely on to protect the value they're paying for, forcing dealmakers toward alternative retention and restrictive covenant strategies.