Wright Ford Young & Co. (WFY), the largest single-office CPA firm in Orange County, has served closely-held companies, family-owned businesses, and high-net-worth individuals across Southern California for more than 50 years. With over 100 professionals in Irvine, the firm has built its reputation on proactive, high-touch advisory work. Its adoption of Accordance demonstrates how purpose-built AI can do more than save time. It can raise the completeness and defensibility of the profession's most difficult questions.
The Challenge
An Expensive, Fragmented Research Stack
Richard Huffman, a CPA and MST with nearly 30 years in the profession and two decades at Wright Ford Young, leads tax research and compliance for the firm's privately held business clients. He also owns the firm's research software decisions, and by late 2024 those decisions were coming to a head.
The firm had layered several tools to cover the full spectrum of research. CCH IntelliConnect supplied the code, regulations, and commentary but fell short in the gray areas, so the firm relied on Bloomberg BNA portfolios for court cases, revenue rulings, and procedures, maintaining five subscriptions for its power users. When Bloomberg's pricing was set to nearly double, Richard began looking for a replacement.
"We'd been with Bloomberg for many years, and I wasn't happy with them. They were going to almost double the subscription price. We just had five subscriptions for our power users to dig in deep on the real critical, gray-area research. I'd really been thinking about what would be a good replacement."
Richard Huffman, CPA, MST
Solution
Purpose-Built AI for Tax Professionals
Accordance reached out just as Richard was rethinking the firm's research stack. During the Accordance Launchpad, two things stood out: the platform's depth and the team behind it, which invested heavily in teaching the firm how to move from simple lookups to the layered, multi-part queries Accordance is built to handle.
Trust came from repeated testing. As a researcher who already knows the general answer, Richard began by running queries where he could check the platform's work against his own expertise. He found the responses to be accurate, well-cited, and more detailed than his own first pass. And unlike other tools, Accordance is trained on federal, state, and global tax authorities that could return answers richly annotated with citations to primary sources.
Impact
Immediate & Measurable Returns
Research that once required most of a day now takes well under an hour, and for Richard those gains go well beyond speed.
"The time savings is tremendous. Research that would have taken two, four, or six hours, I can complete in Accordance in 15 or 20 minutes. Now I'm providing more holistic answers to my client and giving them a playbook. I can do all of that in less time than it would take to do the research without Accordance."
Being able to provide his clients a comprehensive playbook is what Richard values most. While he usually knows the core answer, Accordance brings a lot of value by surfacing and articulating implementation details, contingencies, or alternative considerations. When a client wanted to convert debt to equity for a foreign-owned holding company, Accordance flagged the documentation needed to defend the position in an audit.
"Accordance was really good at saying, here are the things you need to think about and look out for, and here's how you document the file properly to defend yourself if you're audited. I didn't think about documenting the minutes, the board resolutions, all these other things. That's what I liked, the extra recommendations on documenting things properly to withstand an audit."
Firm-wide Improvements to Daily Life
What began as a replacement for Bloomberg reshaped the firm’s approach to research. Accordance now handles the complex, gray-area scenarios, while lighter tools are reserved for routine lookups:
Power users rely on Accordance for deep, multi-source research and client advisory judgments
Partners, directors, and managers use it for complex questions across engagements
"If it's something simple, Copilot does a good enough job. If it's something more complicated, Accordance has that extra oomph. It dives in deeper and finds better results. Now I find myself going directly to Accordance. I don't even use IntelliConnect at all."
Security & Trust
A Closed System With Cited Sources
Like many firms, Wright Ford Young is careful about what client information enters an AI tool, and recently standardized its staff on approved platforms. Accordance earned a higher level of trust because it operates as a closed system, and its transparent citations let Richard verify every answer against primary authority. That assurance has expanded what the firm is willing to do with the platform, from research to reviewing and summarizing operating agreements and other legal documents.
"With Accordance, we have more comfort that it's a completely closed system."
Bottom Line
With Accordance handling the firm's most demanding research, Wright Ford Young expects to lean less on the legacy platforms it once paid for separately, turning a looming price increase into both a cost savings and an upgrade in capability. For a firm whose reputation rests on proactive, year-round advice, the platform has become a way to deliver more complete, more defensible counsel in less time, and Richard is candid that the firm has only begun to explore what it can do.
"In summary, it's just a great tool, very useful. It's really benefited me and the firm tremendously. I'm glad we found it."
