Private Equity Has Changed What the Accounting Firm CFO Actually Does
This is the first post in a four-part blog series on the structural forces reshaping executive hiring at accounting firms — and how the same forces are showing up in the law firms we work with every day.
Private equity has been diving into accounting firms and acquiring them at a pace the legal world has not yet seen. Bigger firms are swallowing smaller practices, and the consolidation is not just changing the stakes around C-suite hiring. It is changing the job itself.
Friedman Williams works across both law firms and accounting firms. Both professions are partnership models under structural pressure, and both are reshaping what they expect from senior leadership. But the accounting timeline is more compressed. Most US states still restrict outside ownership of law firms, so legal consolidation has happened largely through traditional mergers rather than PE rollups. Accounting has no such restriction, and the capital has poured in.
The numbers are striking. More than 1,000 accounting firms globally have been touched by private equity investment in the past decade, according to IFAC. The consolidation index has increased four-fold since 2021, with each direct PE investment generating an average of 7.6 follow-on roll-up acquisitions in 2025. Cornerstone’s PE Deal Tracker logged 170 PE-backed transactions in 2025 and 64 in Q1 2026 alone — a pace approaching 340 deals for the year.
The named transactions tell the same story. Citrin Cooperman was valued at $2 billion under Blackstone in early 2025. Baker Tilly and Moss Adams combined in a $7 billion arrangement creating the sixth-largest US firm. Schellman “flipped” from Lightyear Capital to Goldman Sachs Alternatives in 2026, marking the early arrival of the secondary-PE era in accounting.
Behind the headline numbers is a more important shift. The senior executive job at a PE-backed accounting firm is not the same job it was at a traditional partnership. A CFO at Citrin Cooperman post-Blackstone is doing structurally different work than a CFO at a traditional partnership: different reporting structure, different metrics, different time horizon (a 3–5 year value-creation cycle versus partnership perpetuity), different debt-service realities. The COO role has shifted even further. At PE-backed platforms, a significant share of the job is now M&A integration rather than operations management.
The legal world is running into a softer version of the same story for different reasons. AmLaw 50 COO compensation now routinely exceeds $1.5 million, with firms increasingly benchmarking C-suite pay against equity and non-equity partner midpoints. The CFO who was a controller five years ago is now expected to model margin in real time, manage talent costs, and serve as a strategic partner to firm leadership. Same direction, different driver: legal is being pulled by margin pressure and talent cost inflation, accounting is being pulled by PE capital. The candidate profile each industry needs is converging on the same thing.
The result is a bifurcated executive talent market. PE-backed firms need leaders who can operate inside a sponsor relationship — comfortable with a board, with leverage, with a value-creation timeline. Traditional partnerships, in either profession, need leaders who can defend margin against PE-backed competitors that did not exist five years ago. These are not the same hire, and they are not interchangeable.
The pivot. Hire for the firm you are now, not the firm you were. The candidate who would have been the right CFO in 2019 may be the wrong CFO in 2026 — not because anything is wrong with the candidate, but because the role has changed underneath them. The interview process needs to test for the version of the job that actually exists. The benchmarks need to reflect the structure the firm actually operates in. And the search partner running the process needs to be able to tell the difference between a candidate who has done this work and a candidate who looks like they have.
PE consolidation is the macro story, but it lands inside a labor market that is also changing fast. In the next post in this series, we look at how the CPA pipeline has collapsed faster than firms have adjusted — and what that does to executive search timelines.
