Hello Rainmakers,
There was a time when the natural order of the professional services world was relatively straightforward.
Accountants did the accounts. Lawyers did the law. Corporate finance advisers helped people buy and sell businesses. Everyone knew their place and, for the most part, stayed there.
Those days are looking increasingly quaint, as Sam Metcalf discovers.
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The latest example of the world of professional services turning upside down comes in the shape of Derbyshire-headquartered Nuvo Group, which has acquired Rainworth corporate law firm AG Corporate Law and promptly rebranded it as Nuvo Legal.
It is the latest move in an acquisition strategy designed to propel Nuvo from 73rd in the UK’s Top 100 accountancy firms into the top 25 by 2030.
And somewhere along the way, the definition of what constitutes an accountancy firm has become rather elastic.
Nuvo already offers accountancy, audit, tax, payroll, HR and recruitment services. Now it has lawyers too.
Perhaps corporate finance should start watching its back.
AG Corporate Law will continue to operate from Ransom Wood Business Park in Mansfield, led by founder Adam Gilbert, with its existing team of 20 remaining in place.
The firm advises businesses on corporate, commercial and employment law, including mergers and acquisitions, contracts and restructures.
In other words, it sits rather neatly alongside the services Nuvo already provides.
That is, of course, the point.
Steve Sharp, founder and CEO of Nuvo, and Adam Gilbert, managing director of Nuvo Legal, say the acquisition is part of a much bigger ambition to build a group capable of meeting clients’ needs throughout the life cycle of their businesses.
“Part of the Vision 2030 strategy is for the Nuvo Group to be able to meet all of our clients’ business needs through the acquisition of complementary professional services, including the full life cycle of their business,” they said.
“Legal was the next natural step in that plan.”
There is nothing particularly radical about the logic.
A business considering an acquisition might need accounts, tax advice, corporate finance, legal advice, HR support and eventually recruitment.
The traditional professional services model involved sending that client off to six different firms, each with its own partner, billing structure, systems and view of what constituted an urgent matter.
The modern version increasingly asks: why not keep the lot under one roof?
It is an attractive proposition for clients and, perhaps more importantly, an attractive proposition for the firms doing the buying.
Once you have won the client, there is considerable commercial value in being able to sell more services to them.
That makes the legal sector an obvious target.
The interesting question is whether this is genuinely about creating better joined-up advice or whether it is, at least partly, a rather sophisticated exercise in increasing wallet share.
The answer is probably both.
For accountancy groups pursuing scale, legal services are particularly appealing because they sit close to many of the highest-value transactions undertaken by business clients.
A company sale brings accountants and lawyers together. So does an acquisition. So does a restructuring. So does a management buyout. Employment law follows growth. Commercial contracts follow expansion.
The cross-selling opportunities are hardly difficult to spot.
And this is where the corporate finance community should take notice.
The more professional services groups broaden their offering, the more they begin to look less like traditional accountancy practices and more like multidisciplinary business advisory platforms.
That could create opportunities for clients, but it also raises some interesting questions about independence, conflicts, culture and how these businesses are ultimately valued.
There is also the rather awkward question of what happens when every mid-sized accountancy firm decides it needs a legal arm.
If everyone owns a lawyer, owning a lawyer stops being a differentiator.
Then the race moves on to something else.
Nuvo is already making clear that AG Corporate Law is not intended to be the end of its legal expansion.
“In line with the Vision 2030 strategy we will expand the Nuvo Legal offering to include complementary business legal services that assist our clients on that journey,” Sharp and Gilbert said.
So the acquisition is less a destination than another piece of the platform.
The financial details, however, remain firmly behind the curtain.
Asked what Nuvo paid for AG Corporate Law and how the deal was funded, the answer is simply: confidential.
Current revenue, client numbers and the contribution Nuvo Legal is expected to make to the wider group are also confidential.
What we do know is that the legal business employs 20 people.
For a group with ambitions of reaching the top 25, the numbers that are not being disclosed are arguably as interesting as the ones that are.
Nuvo says its Vision 2030 target is built around “100/50/50”: £100m in fee income by 2030 while maintaining a 50 NPS score across its team and clients.
That growth will come organically and through partnerships and acquisitions.
And this deal is clearly not the end of the shopping trip.
The group says it has multiple partnerships and acquisitions in progress, covering local additions to its existing office network as well as new regional and national locations.
The geography is therefore expanding alongside the service offering.
That makes Nuvo’s ambition rather different from simply becoming a bigger accountancy practice.
It is attempting to build a national professional services group in which accountancy is the foundation rather than the entire proposition.
Adam Gilbert says joining Nuvo represents a new chapter for the legal business while allowing it to retain its existing team and approach.
“Since establishing AG Corporate Law, our focus has always been on practical, commercially focused legal advice and long-term relationships with the businesses we support,” he said.
“As Nuvo Legal, we’ll continue to deliver the same expert advice from the same experienced team, while giving clients access to a broader range of accountancy, tax and advisory services alongside it.”
For Nuvo, the acquisition therefore offers something considerably more useful than another line on an organisational chart.
It gives the group another door into its clients.
And in professional services, another door is rarely just another door. It is another route to fees.
The bigger story is what this says about where the accountancy market is heading.
Nuvo wants £100m of fee income by 2030 and a place among the UK’s top 25 accountancy firms. That cannot be achieved simply by waiting for annual accounts to grow a little faster than inflation.
It requires acquisitions, organic growth and, increasingly, a willingness to redefine what an accountancy group actually is.
The old joke was that accountants wanted to be trusted advisers.
The new version appears to be that they want to be the only adviser left standing.
Lawyers, recruiters, HR consultants, tax specialists and corporate finance advisers are all potential pieces of the same puzzle.
The corporate finance world has spent years helping professional services firms consolidate.
It may now be time to ask whether it has inadvertently helped create a new breed of competitor: the accountant who also happens to own the lawyer.
And if that sounds faintly absurd, remember that someone still has to prepare the accounts.
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