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Development of multi-professional financial participation companies (SPFPL)
A decisive step has just been taken in the development of a legal framework allowing the grouping of accounting and legal professionals, with the aim of offering clients who so wish a one-stop shop for the treatment of their legal and accountants.
Decree No. 2014-354 of March 19, 2014 indeed has a symbolic meaning, in that it supplements, by making effective the possibility of proceeding with the creation of Multiprofessional Financial Participation Companies ( SPFPL), a process of evolution of our law initiated in 2001, but debated since the entry into force of the law of July 24, 1966 on commercial companies. In other words, the stage of “capitalistic inter-professionalism” has now been passed. Lawyers, notaries, bailiffs, accountants, judicial auctioneers, auditors and industrial property attorneys can now come together to develop joint financial and investment projects, while maintaining their traditionally specific autonomy. in the exercise of their profession. On a technical level, article 32-1 of law n°90-1258 of December 31, 1990 and its implementing provisions will allow the creation of holding companies, likely to take the form of a SARL, an SA , an SAS or an SCA, who will simultaneously hold shares or shares in SELs or common law commercial companies in one of the seven professions mentioned above. Expected for several years, interprofessionalism reflects the needs expressed by both professionals and their clients. The former will thus be able to “invest together to act together”, in the words of Edouard de Lamaze, by proceeding to the communication and sharing of information collected by all related professions, and by pooling a certain number of services necessary for the carrying out their activities, such as in particular secretarial activities and legislative and regulatory monitoring.
Benefits and Challenges of Interprofessionalism in Legal and Accounting Services
Perceived as an instrument of “conquest and efficiency”, such an innovation also strengthens the capacity of the French professionals concerned to face formidable foreign competition, the head of which is made up of colossal Anglo-Saxon structures which have made multidisciplinarity their main asset for several years. If the entry into force of such a text therefore deserves, as you will have understood, to be welcomed, it should however be noted that the purely capitalist nature of the inter-professionalism thus established allows certain barriers to remain, since each profession will in principle retain its total autonomy and will continue to be subject to its own ethical rules, so that there will necessarily remain a gap with Anglo-Saxon working methods.
