Arrangement to take advantage of often-overlapping fields of law and accountancy
Ontario-based independent legal firms Pearsall, Marshall, Halliwill & Seaton LLP (PMHS Law) and Ingenuity Counsel and accounting firm Baker Tilly Trillium LLP have launched their formal affiliation.
The professional services of accounting and law are rarely formally affiliated in Ontario and throughout Canada, Baker Tilly Trillium said in a statement. Through the affiliation, Baker Tilly Trillium will provide corporate commercial, real estate, family, estates and U.S./cross-border legal services.
Due to regulatory requirements, all legal services branches will remain separate entities from Baker Tilly Trillium, but the two consultancies will function (as allowed by industry regulation) as a joint group for the purposes of branding and marketing, resource management and most importantly the holistic provision of specialty client services.
In addition to the financial services Baker Tilly Trillium provides, the legal services of the two law firms will be much more accessible to its clients, the firms say.
"As providers of expertise that often overlap in terms of a client's needs, this is a tremendous opportunity to provide the combined professional services of law and accounting,” said Jason Melo, Baker Tilly Trillium managing partner. “We are creating complementary business support capabilities that are value-adds for our clients.”
"The legal services and accounting industries have long missed out on the opportunity to combine resources and client acquisition/management processes," said David Halliwill, managing partner of PMHS Law. "We can provide greater value to our clients together, saving them time, expense and the headache of working with two separate sets of professionals."
“There is consistently an accounting component to the legal work we provide, and the opposite is true as well, which we were previously sending out-of-house,” added Michael Kennedy, founder of Ingenuity Counsel. “Now, clients will neither have to explain the complexity of their joint legal/accounting needs nor search on their own for the right experts to address them.”
