Nonlawyer-Owned Firms Fill Consumer Justice Gaps Left by Big Law

I operate inside one of the most closely watched and controversial shifts in the history of the American legal system.

When Arizona adopted an alternative business structure, or ABS, in 2021 authorizing equity ownership of law firms by non-lawyers, skeptics warned of rampant ethical issues. When KPMG was granted permission last year to practice law in Arizona under an ABS, the criticism only grew.

This debate has led to pushback from the legal community, while proponents and detractors of alternative law firm structures have put forth competing bills in statehouses across the country.

As the head of an Arizona ABS-licensed law firm, I can speak to what this system has delivered, what it’s like operating under its compliance guidelines, and why I believe it can address one of America’s most pressing issues: lack of access to the legal system.

Today, only well-resourced individuals and corporations can hire reputable law firms that leverage the latest in legal technology. Such tools generally aren’t used by law firms servicing low-income Americans or small businesses.

Many Americans struggle to access the legal system because the economics are impractical. Traditional law firms rarely make money on one-off consumer protection or smaller wage theft claims where clients can’t pay billable hours, so unless a firm takes a case on a pro bono basis, such cases struggle to find a legal advocate.

ABS law firms address the access-to-service issue by enabling innovations that make pursuing consumer protection claims possible. It has allowed our company, working on contingency, to build a team of attorneys and engineers to represent more than 100,000 clients, each of them at zero out-of-pocket cost.

We do this by using technology to scale the operational work of client representation: onboarding, review, and communication. For example, rules-based logic helps organize client information and surface cases that meet defined eligibility criteria, while our Partner Portal provides real-time access to client records and case status.

The combination of legal team plus technology infrastructure enables us to operate at a level of complaint scale that a traditional law firm structure can’t support.

While new, the ABS framework has started delivering on its promise of expanded legal access. A 2025 Stanford Law School study of the Arizona ABS program noted that 85% of its ABSs intend to deliver legal services to individual consumers and 24% plan to service small to mid-sized businesses.

Contrary to the warnings of critics, this expansion hasn’t come at the cost of consumer safety. The Stanford Law study found “de minimis evidence of consumer harm” from ABS firms. Given this, why are some states considering banning firms from partnering with ABS-licensed law firms?

From an ethics perspective, critics say the ABS model is risky because non-lawyers like myself aren’t subject to the same ethical obligations as attorneys. In practice, the opposite is true. Ethical violations at ABS firms, by both lawyers and non-lawyers, are more strictly regulated and substantially punished than at non-ABS firms.

At a traditional firm, an ethics violation is an individual problem. If an attorney commits an ethics violation, they risk discipline or revocation of their law license by the state bar. But the punishment levied is typically contained to the individual attorneys involved in the violation. The rest of the firm continues to practice unaffected by their colleague’s ethical violations.

In Arizona’s ABS regime, in addition to the individual lawyers’ licensure, the entity holds a separate license, and an ethics violation could lead to an audit, suspension, or revocation of this license at any point. Should I or any one of my employees or attorneys commit an ethics violation, it would imperil our entire business. The firm-level risk that accompanies an ethics violation as an ABS enforces accountability.

ABS firms are among the most regulated in the country. The number of entity-level guardrails we operate under is substantial, designed by Arizona to enforce compliance in our day-to-day operations. These include conducting semi-annual audits, biennial license renewals, disclosing and submitting applications for all authorized persons for approval, designating a compliance attorney, and maintaining governance structures and policies ensuring lawyer independence.

These guardrails aren’t overhead. They’re practical transparency and governance rules to uphold responsible operations.
Looking beyond Arizona, it’s a matter of when, not if, additional states institute their own reforms. In our system of government that enables states to function as “laboratories of democracy,” the Arizona ABS experiment has proven to be an example worth following.

In adopting alternative law firm frameworks, states have the benefit of incorporating some of Arizona’s key lessons. Four main ones stand out:

• Regulate at the entity level. Entity-level accountability creates firm-wide responsibility.
• Build-in feedback loops. Arizona updated ABS applicant criteria in March 2026 based on industry feedback.
• Require ownership and control transparency and approval. ABS structure sheds light on control and ownership questions.
• Implement attorney independence governance. ABS structure prevents attorney judgment from interfering in client matters.

Wider adoption by states of the ABS or similar frameworks will mean more legal innovation, access to legal services, and transparency in law firm structure and operations.

The current legal system is failing Americans. Arizona has shown there is a better way.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Tax, and Bloomberg Government, or its owners.

Author Information

Matt Freund is co-founder and CEO of ClaimsHero.

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