Meeting at the beginning of this week in Chicago, senior figures at the annual conference of the American Bar Association were at opposite ends of a debate that fell into deadlock over the issue.
According to a report in the ABA Journal, the association’s House of Delegates was scheduled to consider a resolution backing an existing policy stating that non-lawyer ownership is ‘inconsistent with the core values of the legal profession’. But as agreement was impossible, a decision on the resolution was postponed indefinitely.

Overseas developments

During the debate, former ABA president, H Thomas Well Jr -- a partner with Alabama law firm Maynard Cooper & Gale -- lambasted the conservative status quo, maintaining that continued consideration of alternative practice structures was crucial in the light of developments in overseas jurisdictions.
However, John Thies, president of the Illinois State Bar Association, countered by telling the delegates that ‘members of the profession across the country are concerned that we are seeing a movement to multi-disciplinary practice by another name’. He continued: ‘We are not sticking our heads in the sand, but are standing on core principles that have served our clients well in the past and will continue to do so in the future.’
Philadelphia delegate Lawrence Fox joined the naysayers, telling the meeting that the ABA should be in the business of ‘exporting our standards, not importing the lowest common denominator from some other country’.

Cash call

External investment in law firms has been allowed for several years in Australia, with one significant practice listed on the local stock exchange. While the biggest changes have come in England with implementation earlier this year of provisions allowing alternative business structures that include external investment and non-lawyer ownership.  
Meanwhile, only a few days after the ABA row, a leading Miami-based law firm illustrated how external cash injections might be useful to US legal practices.
The AmLaw Daily web site reports that Greenberg Traurig last month drummed up more than $24 million from its equity partners in a bid to ‘safeguard against uncertainty in the US and international markets’. According to the report, the firm maintained that it was not facing an immediate cash requirement, but nonetheless the move is the first ‘cash call’ the practice has made in more than a decade.