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Oscar Dean

Oscar Dean

Associate Director, Financial & Professional Services M&A at Grant Thornton UK specializing in insurance, claims, and regulated professional services including legal

Jun 30, 2026

13:53
Why do you think, Oscar, some certain peptides haven't been approved by the regulators yet?
14:01
There's a multitude of factors, really.
14:04
First factor is you can't patent biology.
14:07
Peptides are naturally occurring molecules and you can't legally patent them because you can't own biology.
14:13
And secondly, is they're pretty difficult to make.
14:16
You have to synthesize them, obviously, and that requires, you know, careful process.
14:20
You know, you don't want to synthesize peptide and you might, you know, get contamination and heavy metals and that kind of thing.
15:49
So the actual peptide itself is okay?
4:47
Yeah.
4:48
Yeah, so I guess if we look back over the last 10 years or so, you know, M&A transactions in legal services have been happening.
4:56
But typically what we've been seeing is mergers between LLPs at various ends of the market.
5:02
And I think what we've started to see, particularly past COVID, A number of private equity funds have had success in professional services more broadly, particularly accounting as the case study, but also sort of heavy consolidation plays in wealth, insurance broking, other sort of people-based regulated sectors.
5:21
These private equity funds have had real success.
5:24
And I think they've got comfortable with the concept of investing in businesses which are people-based and are now looking sort of further afield and seeing actually legal services is an enormous market.
5:36
It's highly fragmented.

11 MINS LATER

16:53
Oscar, where's the activity then at the moment? Because, you know, you'll be pretty close to

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