Pinsent Masons has been investing in its in-house forensic accounting team in recent years as the firm looks to retain some of the fees previously shipped out to external accountants and provide a more rounded service for clients.
Hinesh Shah (pictured left), a forensic accountant who was previously at PwC, joined the firm in 2019 and made partner in May 2024 – the same time that David Lister joined as a partner from EY. With Hayley Boxall, the head of the team who has been at the firm since 2006, the group now has a total of three partners and six associates.
Though Pinsents has had in-house forensic accountants for several decades, in the year to November 2025, the forensic accounting services (FAS) team doubled its billings. This includes matters run within the team, but also elements of work led by FAS partners on matters led by other teams. The FAS team sits in the Litigation, Regulatory and Tax department, but frequently aids colleagues in the corporate or disputes teams.
For the last five years the FAS team has worked in tandem with the civil fraud team advising the Danish Customs and Tax Administration (SKAT) on its £1.4bn cum-ex claim against defunct hedge fund Solo Capital, which SKAT lost in October last year.
On a case that involves complex trading analysis and money tracing, having in-house forensic accountants who specialise in these areas allows the lawyers on the team to focus solely on the legal strategy.
In practice, however, the two are never completely separate. ‘A strategy can develop in isolation but every litigation factor will have numbers on a page, that’s where we start getting involved,’ Shah explained.
‘What our lawyers have seen is that there is always a sizeable chunk of financial analysis or quantum related work that we can do in-house before the experts get involved,’ Shah said.
Because the firm’s lawyers will be acting as litigators on potential matters, Shah or Lister cannot act as independent witnesses in the same way that an accountant from the big four would be able to.
Nevertheless, much of the work surrounding the expert’s report can be kept in house, meaning, Shah said: ‘We could keep a larger proportion of the revenues for the firm and ensure the experts we did have to engage acted proportionately.’
The firm is one of only a handful of top firms to have forensic accountants in-house. Others include Clifford Chance and Clyde & Co – but these, unlike Pinsents, don’t elevate their accountants to the level of partner.
For Shah, it was important to be able to get the title of partner, and with Boxall being made a partner in 2020, the year after Shah joined, Shah saw the firm was ‘serious’ about growing the team and embedding partners like him earlier in matters to better capture their value.
‘We have another associate joining in Scotland soon and we’re looking at building the disputes side to develop more bandwidth to support Hayley’s work as her skill set is different to David’s and mine,’ Shah said.
Building the team will help to free up Shah and Lister, as associates can shoulder much of the burden of compliance work arising from the new Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act – the new compliance framework, introduced in legislation in 2023 and brought into force in stages since – which has formed a sizeable part of the team’s workload over the last 18 months.
With a larger team, Shah and Lister will have more scope to be out in the market generating work directly from chief financial officers, finance directors, heads of compliance and internal audits.
Pinsents’ forensic accountants also aim to seize opportunities that arise through their existing client work. For example, a client’s legal team that gets to know the FAS team through an M&A transaction may then turn to Pinsents for forensic accounting work.
As well as pitching their services externally, Shah and Lister are working to tap the potential of the firm’s 500-strong partnership, ensuring partners know which services the firm’s forensic accountants can offer, so the partners can market these services to their clients.
‘It is helpful for the lawyers to be able to offer our in-house services that can help them navigate those challenges with auditors or queries about internal investigations that have been done,’ said Shah.
‘Auditors are getting more nervous now,’ Shah explained, adding that he believes the energy and infrastructure space is where there is likely to be government interest in enforcing the new ECCTA legislation, compared to already heavily regulated sectors like banking.
‘Auditors are being more strict and this is putting our clients under pressure,’ he added. ‘A lot of my work now is building those relationships so when they have an issue they have a direct line into me.’
