Private equity players are accelerating investments in the legal market, taking specific aim at personal injury and plaintiffs-side firms and raising hundreds of millions in capital to finance deals.
As we wrote in June, the nation’s largest plaintiffs firm, Morgan & Morgan, has reportedly hired J.P. Morgan to explore selling a minority stake to outside investors, particularly private equity firms. The transaction, according to media accounts, could be completed by the end of the year and may eventually result in a public offering for the firm.
Most estimates put the deal’s potential value at more than $1 billion—a record for outside law firm investment. But the potential Morgan & Morgan transaction is hardly an outlier. In recent months, a series of firms have signed agreements or entered into exploratory discussions with outside investors. At the same time, valuations have been rising, and at least one private equity group has created a nine-figure fund to make investments.
“Law firms are the one area that private equity hasn’t been able to get a foothold in, and they are eager to get into this space to make it successful,” Cecy Graf, co-founder of MSO Federate Legal, recently told Bloomberg.
- Private equity firms are rapidly investing in personal injury law firms, with Morgan & Morgan reportedly exploring a deal valued at more than $1 billion. Law firm leaders face growing pressure to evaluate outside capital before competitors scale faster.
- Managed services organizations, or MSOs, are becoming the preferred structure for separating legal work from marketing, technology and operations. Uplift Investors alone launched a $670 million fund and completed multiple PI firm deals in 2026.
- Investors are targeting personal injury firms for predictable case volume, aggressive marketing potential and expansion opportunities across states. Firms like Rafi Law Group are using outside funding to fuel acquisitions, advertising and AI investments.
- States including Colorado and Illinois are tightening rules around nonlawyer ownership and fee sharing, making compliance strategy increasingly important as private equity activity moves from experimental to mainstream.
An Aggressive Deal Strategy
Among the most aggressive PE firms has been Connecticut-based Uplift Investors. Since January, the private equity group has announced four investment deals with personal injury firms, rolling up their back-office functions into Uplift’s Orion Legal MSO.
In July, Uplift announced the formation of a $670 million fund to invest in legal and other service businesses. Forbes reported that Uplift is looking for “narrow niches where a fragmented market and a repeatable business model give it room to build a larger platform.” The group is focusing on five services sectors, including legal, financial, knowledge and talent solutions, technical trades and industrial.
Personal injury firms are among the “micro-sectors” where Uplift hopes to cluster a “few dozen companies where it can back one platform, improve operations, and build a market leader through acquisitions and growth,” Forbes said.
Uplift formed Orion Legal in January specifically to serve as a managed services organization, or MSO, for leading plaintiffs-side firms and simultaneously announced its first deal with Louisiana personal injury firm Dudley DeBosier. In May, Orion partnered with Kentucky-based Hughes & Coleman and a month later, it announced a deal with John Foy & Associates, based in Georgia.
Separating the Back Office
In its latest transaction, announced in July, Uplift signed a deal with Rhode Island-based Bottaro Injury Lawyers, a firm that has been expanding across the state and into neighboring Massachusetts. (Holland & Knight served as legal counsel to Orion in the transaction. Adler Pollock & Sheenan advised Bottaro.)
“For years, we’ve invested in building systems that help us better serve our clients and grow responsibly,” Mike Bottaro, founder of Bottaro Injury Lawyers, said in a news release. “Joining Orion allows us to continue that momentum and devote even more of our energy where it matters most—delivering exceptional results for our clients.”
Orion provides the firms with non-legal operational support services, including marketing, finance, technology, talent, and administrative infrastructure. In an MSO structure, one business entity—the law firm—handles services that require a lawyer and are paid for through legal fees. Non-legal services and administrative and back-office operations are housed in another entity, the managed services organization. The law firm then pays the MSO for the services it provides.
The structure—already relatively common among other types of professional services businesses—can help law firms avoid ethics issues. Under the American Bar Association’s Model Rule 5.4, “a lawyer or law firm shall not share legal fees with a nonlawyer.” The rule also holds that lawyers “shall not form a partnership with a nonlawyer if any of the activities of the partnership consist of the practice of law.”
The $450 Million MSO
Orion is not the only MSO looking to make deals with multiple firms. According to Bloomberg, Texas-based litigation finance and insurance company Certum Group acquired a managed services organization late last year and is working with law firms on a fees-for-services basis. Certum will consider “acquiring stakes in law firms down the road,” Bloomberg said. Another litigation funder, Burford Capital, is also considering MSO investments, Law.com reported last year.
Meanwhile, deal and MSO valuations are climbing. In April, Arizona’s Rafi Law Group said it would spin off its back-office services into an MSO in exchange for $125 million from an outside investor. The firm said the new MSO is valued at roughly $450 million, which, according to media reports, is currently the largest publicly disclosed deal of its kind.
The 30-lawyer Rafi Law Group focuses on personal injury cases and was founded in 2015. The firm is known for its omnipresent billboard and bus advertising in the Southwest, and by its own accounts, has represented nearly 100,000 clients. The cash infusion is expected to help Rafi with geographic expansion, additional marketing, technology, and potential law firm acquisitions.
While the name of the investor was undisclosed when the deal was announced, The Financial Times later reported that Rafi had secured funding from the Fortress Investment Group. Fortress is no stranger to investment in personal injury firms, having previously taken a minority stake in Esquire Law, also based in Arizona, the Financial Times said.
The Appeal of PI Firms
Personal injury and plaintiffs firms like Rafi are attractive to private equity investors because of their predictable and large volume of fast-settling cases. Such firms are also unlikely to see business dry up during tough economic times. Auto accidents and slip-and-fall cases do not disappear in a recession.
Such firms also tend to be marketing powerhouses, and any additional financial firepower generated by a deal with a private equity group should allow them to pursue an even higher volume of valuable cases. And unlike large corporate firms, personal injury firms offer a model many PE investors are already well-versed in scaling—a consumer-oriented business with a heavy focus on customer acquisition through advertising and lead generation.
“Personal injury law is positioned as one of the most scalable consumer legal segments due to its combination of marketing leverage, standardized workflows, and fragmented supply,” Greenwich Capital Group, an investment bank, said in a recent article.
The article also noted that investors will likely pursue “cross-state expansion, adjacent practice integration, technology-enabled case analytics, and the development of national consumer legal brands.” Several well-known personal injury law firms, the bank said, have “initiated processes to explore partnerships with external institutional investors to fund acquisitions, marketing expansion, and technology investment.”
An Invitation-Only Event
How interested are private equity investors in personal injury firms? Consider a recent invitation-only conference organized by Holland & Knight at its New York office. The event brought together investors and PI firm leaders to discuss the benefits and risks of investment arrangements.
Personal injury lawyers who attended the conference “came away with a keen sense of private equity’s encroachment on their turf,” Bloomberg reported. Investors can provide firms with fast cash and growth opportunities. And “some lawyers see the need to adopt the private equity model or find themselves being out-competed in the legal marketplace." James Amaro, name partner at Houston-based Amaro Injury Lawyers, told Bloomberg that ignoring private equity could put law firms at risk. PE firms, he said, have “already done their homework, and they’re moving fast.”
Indeed, among the attendees were Apollo Global Management, Fortress, and Stifel Financial Corp. And Bloomberg reported that one of Holland & Knight’s private equity-backed clients has already closed two deals this year, and a lawyer at the firm expects to “wrap a dozen” deals in 2026.
Exploring Investment Options
Personal injury firms are not the only ones looking at possible private equity investments, of course. On Aug. 16, Bloomberg reported that 125-lawyer Ellenoff Grossman & Schole, a firm best known for its work advising on special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), has been meeting with potential investors and financial and ethics advisers about forming an MSO to raise outside capital.
“Given the way states are responding to the MSOs, that makes it ethically acceptable to go forward in a way I wouldn’t have thought of a decade ago,” Douglas Ellenoff, one of the firm’s name partners, told Bloomberg.
Los Angeles-based deals boutique Massumi & Consoli reached an investment agreement in May with Dallas-based PE firm Trive Capital. The transaction is specifically aimed at bolstering the firm’s artificial intelligence capabilities. New York’s Cohen & Gresser has also been exploring a potential $40 million investment, although no deal has yet been announced.
Among Big Law firms, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan has held talks with investment bank Guggenheim Securities to explore investment options, according to the Financial Times. It also reported that Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison has been pitched by potential investors, though the firm said it is not currently pursuing a transaction. Proskauer has met with one private equity group to discuss MSO structures, and White & Case has formed an internal group to examine investment options, the publication said.
McDermott Will & Schulte has also investigated a potential private equity deal and has met with investors and advisers. However, the firm “remains far from making a decision,” the Financial Times reported.
Regulatory Questions
Even as the pace of deals accelerates, some states are responding with tougher regulations. Colorado’s new Legal Practice Integrity and Fee-Sharing Prohibition Act took effect on Aug. 12. The law bans lawyers from sharing legal fees or revenue with nonlawyers or alternative business structures, prohibits lawyers from contracting with an alternative business structure on anything related to legal services, bars lawyers from forming an entity with nonlawyers that provides legal services, and makes it illegal for a lawyer to practice in a company that a nonlawyer owns or controls.
“The Act speaks in the neutral language of ‘outside capital’ and ‘nonlawyers,’ but in practice it is aimed at one thing in particular: private equity,” Clark Hill partner Michael Laszlo recently wrote.
On Aug. 7, Illinois’ Public Act 104-0801 also took effect. The new law does not ban MSOs, but it prevents non-lawyers and non-lawyer-owned entities from interfering with lawyers’ professional judgment, controlling hiring, or accessing client files. The law also imposes limits on fee structures and contractual provisions and requires disclosure of MSO arrangements to clients.
Some see the new state laws as critical to keeping legal decisions in the hands of lawyers. Bruce Pfaff, a former personal injury attorney who helped draft the Illinois law, told Bloomberg he doesn’t trust that the private equity firms will keep their hands off legal decisions. The practice of law “can’t easily be divorced from what the MSO people would call the business of law and the back-office stuff,” he said.
Moving Beyond the Experimental
But others see the regulatory changes as little more than a speed bump for MSO transactions. “Legislators are trying to codify the lawyer independence principle,” Trisha Rich, a Holland & Knight ethics lawyer, told Bloomberg. “A properly structured and managed MSO should fit properly within the legislation as currently drafted.”
Expect the momentum for deals and regulation to intensify—particularly if a headline-grabbing mega-deal involving a firm like Morgan & Morgan should come to fruition. Even if it does not, private equity investment appears to be entering a new phase, particularly where personal injury firms are concerned.
As Greenwich Capital Group noted, investments are “moving beyond experimental ownership structures toward scalable platform consolidation.” Multi-state roll-ups and brand expansion are now likely. “As capital continues to enter consumer legal services,” Greenwich said, “personal injury platforms are likely to become foundational assets within broader legal services investment strategies.”
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an MSO in the legal industry? An MSO, or managed services organization, is a separate business entity that provides non-legal support—marketing, finance, technology, and administration—to a law firm in exchange for a fee. It allows outside investors to fund and profit from a firm's growth without directly owning the law practice, which ethics rules prohibit.
Is it legal for private equity to invest in law firms? Private equity firms cannot directly own equity in a law practice or share legal fees with lawyers under ABA Model Rule 5.4. Instead, they invest in MSOs that handle a firm's non-legal operations. Some states, including Colorado and Illinois, have recently passed laws specifically regulating or restricting these arrangements.
Why is private equity focused on personal injury law firms? Personal injury firms offer high, predictable case volume, recession-resistant demand, and a marketing-driven growth model that private equity investors already know how to scale—making them easier to value and grow than most other legal practice areas.
Is Morgan & Morgan selling to private equity? As of August 2026, Morgan & Morgan has reportedly hired J.P. Morgan to explore selling a minority stake to outside investors, with a potential valuation exceeding $1 billion. No deal has been finalized.
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David L. Brown is a legal affairs writer and consultant, who has served as head of editorial at ALM Media, editor-in-chief of The National Law Journal and Legal Times, and executive editor of The American Lawyer. He consults on thought leadership strategy and creates in-depth content for legal industry clients and works closely with Best Law Firms as senior content consultant.