Private Equity Has Found Injury Law. Here's What That Means for Us.

Sometime in the next year or two, I'll likely be changing the name of my firm and rebranding. It will make the shift from the standard "combination of partner names" to something that is proprietary and marketable at scale. I mention this not to be dramatic, but because it's a signal of where I think this industry is heading and how seriously I'm taking it.

I run a ten-year-old PI firm in the Philadelphia area. We've grown about 300 percent over the last two years. I started as a trial lawyer, but I now focus most of my time on the operations side. I also go to a lot of conferences (masterminds, coaching groups, summits), so I tend to hear about things before they make the rounds.

Here's what's been happening that has my ears perked up: In January, Dudley DeBosier sold its non-lawyer operations to private equity. In March, Rafi Law Group closed a $125 million deal. MSO transactions are picking up across legal, and plaintiff PI is right at the front of it. There was a recent private equity day in Baltimore with Tim McKey of Vista Consulting and a room full of lawyers, bankers and venture capitalists. These aren't rumors. Deals are getting done.

Most plaintiff lawyers I talk to haven't heard about any of this. That's the part that concerns me.

How Private Equity Is Getting In

They're not coming through the alternative business structures in Arizona or Utah - too much compliance overhead for most investors. They're coming through MSOs, management services organizations. It's the same structure they used with dental groups and medical practices.

Here is basically how it works. The MSO owns and manages everything except the lawyers. Non-lawyer staffing, marketing, operations, payroll, case management, and technology are all owned and operated by the MSO. The lawyers stay independent in the law firm. The MSO takes its cut through a cost-plus management fee arrangement, and non-lawyer investors get to participate in the economics. Smart attorneys are realizing this is ethical because law firm ownership hasn't actually changed. The MSO acts like a big vendor to the law firm. Wall Street is realizing PI firms carry good margins. Both of those things are true at the same time, which is why the money is moving.

The Math

In most markets, firms are spending $2,000 to $3,000 to acquire each signed auto case. In California and a few other states, it's $4,000 to $6,000. As more capital floods in and the competition heats up, those numbers go up. Think about five Morgan & Morgan-scale operations in every major city, all running aggressive ad campaigns. Case acquisition costs skyrocket. Margins shrink. Smaller shops, especially the solo and two-attorney practices where the founder never really built operations underneath themselves, start to feel it.

The way I see it, that leaves three real options.

The first is to grow and compete. Build to a scale where you can hold your ground against the consolidators. That means real operations: a proper marketing budget, intake that actually works, a leadership team that can run the place when you're not there. It means thinking of the firm as a business that happens to practice law, rather than a law practice that happens to generate revenue.

The second is to grow and position for acquisition. Private equity is currently looking at firms in the $15 million to $25 million-plus revenue range with clean operations, healthy EBITDA, and middle management that doesn't depend entirely on the named partner. Most of the deals I'm hearing about are structured as a 70 to 80 percent buyout, with the owner retaining 20 to 30 percent and staying on for three to five years. The PE firm then rolls up a platform of firms and sells the whole thing for multiple times what it paid. Two payouts for the original owner. None of the platform sales have happened yet in law, but other industries have already been through it.

The third option is to do "nothing" and that tends to mean the firm gradually shrinks, gets absorbed quietly, or stops taking new cases when the founder eventually steps back.

What You Actually Have to Build

Whether you want to compete or sell, the operational work required is almost identical. Either way, you need a real business underneath the law practice. Most plaintiff attorneys I talk to aren't there yet, and that's the gap.

At our firm, here's what we actually did. About three years ago, we got into business coaching. It forced my partner and I to get honest about where the firm was going and what we were building toward. From there, we identified who we are and who we wanted to be, starting with true core values and a mission statement. We brought on an operations manager, middle managers, and this year a fractional CFO. We built SOPs for every role and KPIs for every employee.

We focused on intake before we tried to scale anything else. Every case we miss is real money gone. Pouring leads into a broken intake process doesn't work, regardless of how much you spend on marketing.

We also moved our case management to Litify, which runs on Salesforce. Once we made the switch, I could pull any metric I needed with a simple query.

Choosing an AI Partner

Picking an AI partner turned out to be more complicated than I expected. There are five or six well-funded companies pitching plaintiff PI right now, and they all have different roadmaps. I wasn't looking for generic legal AI - I needed something built specifically for plaintiff PI, pre-litigation work in particular, not tools designed for the defense bar.

That's what narrowed it down to Eve.

Eve syncs with Litify automatically every night. Every document we upload gets ingested without anyone on my team having to do it manually. That matters more than it might sound: if paralegals must upload twice, things get missed. And if an attorney is pulling together a complaint or a mediation memo and the AI is working from an incomplete case file, the consequences can be serious. The auto-sync was non-negotiable for us.

That's what the operational picture looks like in 2026 if you're trying to build something durable: coaching, real management, documented processes, intake that converts, advanced case management, and AI that's integrated through the entire life of the case. None of those things are optional anymore, regardless of where you want to end up.

Where We're Headed

My goal is to get the firm to around $20 to $30 million in revenue before I seriously think about any deal. I'm also looking at setting up our own MSO, partly for the tax structure, partly because it puts us in a better position no matter which direction we eventually go.

The broader point isn't that every PI firm should sell. A lot of them shouldn't. The point is that private equity has already run this playbook on dentists, on roofing companies, on HVAC. Law is next. The window to make a deliberate choice about what you want (grow and compete, grow and sell, or something else) is open right now. At some point it won't be.

Pick the path that actually fits what you're trying to build. Just pick it on purpose.

Michael L. Saile, Jr. is a founder and the Managing Partner of Cordisco & Saile LLC, a personal injury firm in the Philadelphia area focusing on traumatic brain injury and catastrophic injury cases.

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