A select commission of the American Bar Association spoke last week with a single and authoritative voice in making a revolutionary proposal: The time has come to let lawyers share fees with nonlawyers. The announcement was seen as the most significant step yet toward the time when firms will span law, accounting, and other professions.

Not so fast.

There's a long and likely con-tentious process ahead. If the recommendations on so-called multidisciplinary practice are to take root, they first must survive the ABA's 532-member House of Delegates—a kind of parliament where the legal establishment wields power. And then they must face the states and win the backing of bar associations, courts, and even legislatures.

The immediate reaction to the proposal illustrates how strongly lawyers feel about the issue: The commission released its report at 1:30 p.m. on June 8. By 11 a.m. the next day, more than 1,000 responses had been registered on the commission's Web site.

One of the chief proponents of the recommendation, ABA President Philip Anderson, says he hopes for a vote at the group's annual meeting in August. Overall, he says, it's likely to take at least two years to get the plan through the states—where it could be approved, modified, or rejected.

The panel's key proposal was to change the ABA's Model Rules to allow multi-disciplinary partnerships between lawyers and others such as accountants and psy-chotherapists.

Now the question inciting battle is how.

BATTLE LINES DRAWN

On one side are lawyers, primarily from big firms and academia, who say that the recommendation, if adopted, could spell doom for the profession's core values. On the other side is a surprising mix of consumer advocates, solo practitioners, accounting firms and even some big law firms.

The fight will be waged in state bars, often strongholds of traditionalism. "Given the pattern of state and local bars of protecting their own interests as lawyers, it's going to be a fight when this proposal goes forward" says Jim Turner, executive director of HALT, a D.C.--based legal reform organization.

In Nevada and Virginia, for example, the unauthorized practice of law is a felony offense. And key states like New York, California, and Florida are consid-ered equally aggressive in protecting tra-ditional prerogatives.

But the issue was one that, given current trends, had to be faced.

Partly in response to the recent exodus of lawyers to large professional services organizations like the Big Five account-ing firms and partly with an eye on the rapid growth of multidisciplinary prac-tices in Europe, Anderson appointed the commission last August to come up with the American legal community's response.

Three major points in the ABA proposal are attracting the most attention from both sides of the debate.

In emphasizing that the conflict of interest and confidentiality rules that strictly govern law firms should also apply unchanged to MDPs, the commission tempered the potential boon to big accounting firms that fee sharing could bring. After all, a firm of 5,000 professionals—-including thousands of lawyers, CPAs, and others—would have a lot of built--in client conflicts.

Multinational law firms and big integrated service firms like the Big Five would much rather see conflict of interest rules applied to individual lawyers rather than to entire firms. But many in the organized bar say that maintaining the so-called rule of imputation—in which one lawyer's conflict becomes the firm’s conflict—is fundamental to protec-ting clients.

"I, for one, think that eliminating the imputation rule is a terrible idea," says Therese Stewart, presi-dent of the Bar Association of San Francisco and a partner at Howard, Rice, Nemerovski, Canady, Falk & Rabkin there. "If you have those rules go by the wayside, you will have lawyers in the same firm with clients whose interests seriously conflict," Stewart says. "What if it would be more prof-itable for the firm for one of the parties to win?"

Another hidden issue involves the commis-sion's stab at defining the practice of law.

The report says that legal services "denote those services which, if provided by a lawyer engaged in the practice of law, would be regarded as part of such practice of law for pur-poses of application of the rules of pro-fessional conduct:"

In other words, the consulting that many lawyers at the Big Five provide now would be considered the practice of law—and draw regulatory attention.

The definition is important because, according to the proposal, any multidisciplinary practice offering legal services, but controlled by nonlawyers, would have to submit to the oversight of the highest court in each jurisdiction. The MDP would tile an annual report listing each of the lawyers involved in the organization and stating that the ethical obligations and professional independence of those lawyers will not be compromised. The courts would also have authority to conduct administrative audits of MDPs.

"How do you deal with a legal practice that is owned and controlled by nonlawyers? The com-mission essentially turned that problem over to the courts," says Terry Cone, a counsel in New York's Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton who questions the report's treatment of partnerships between lawyers and accountants.

Paul Kamenar, executive legal director of the Washington Legal Foun-dation, a conservative public interest law firm,- states that while MDPs would be beneficial for consumers, the logistics of a state court's jurisdiction over firms will have to be fleshed out. At this point, New York is the only state that regulates law firms in addition to individual lawyers.

"I'm not sure that state courts have the authority to accept regulation on their own over MDPs without enacting some kind of legislation," Kamenar says.

And it's wrong to only regulate the multidisciplinary practices not controlled by lawyers, say some critics.

"It's another guild rule," says Laura Wertheimer, a partner in D.C.'s Shea & Gardner who assisted Arthur Andersen in a Texas bar proceeding last year in which the accounting firm was accused of engaging in the unauthorized practice of law. (A hearing committee dismissed the charges.)

"If you are worried about protecting core values, apply an audit function to everyone," Wertheimer says. "You have to wonder why they didn't," she adds.

Although ABA President Anderson wants the panel's recommendation to come to a vote in August, few believe two months is enough time for the bar to digest the commission's report.

"You mention MDPs, and for most lawyers, the initial reaction is their eyes glaze over and they mumble something about the unauthorized practice of law," says Ward Bower, a law firm consultant with Altman Weil.

Holding the vote off until the midyear meeting in February 2000 may leave more time to sway doubters, but the most visible and vocal reactions to the report likely will be negative. Those in favor of MDPs already have the ABA commission on their side.

Lawrence Fox, a partner in Philadelphia's Drinker, Biddle & Reath, says he hopes there will be more than two months for discussion before the recom-mendation comes to a vote.

"We're jumping off a cliff, and we don't know if there is foam rubber down there or rocks, or both," he warns.

Fox has been one of the most vocal opponents of MDPs during the last year. And although his speeches are met with great I applause, "I have no sense that there are 100 people fighting the good fight," he says.