The audit risks of family firms are often perceived to be higher than non-family firms. However, the family firms may also engage high-quality external auditor to alleviate the information asymmetry, enhance credibility of financial reports, and increase the firm value. Using unique unbalanced panel dataset of 2,724 firm-year observations collected from the main board listed firms in Hong Kong for the period 2001 - 2009, the results show that family firms have higher likelihood to appoint Big 5 auditors, it supports the signaling hypothesis. Surprisingly, contrasting the perceived higher audit risk, they incur lower audit fees. The results also show the independent audit committee members with multiple directorships are not affected by their busyness. My results are also robust to the alternative definition of family firms and by using the sub-sample within 2004 - 2009. The results suggest that the choice of external auditors matters to audit risk for family firms. For the additional study, even though family firms have a higher likelihood to engage high-quality auditors than non-family firms, I find no evidence that family firms engage more non-audit services from their incumbent auditors, in other words no support for the independence impairment issue from higher non-audit fees.