Berlin: Don't rush to judgment on multidisciplinary practices.

Howard Berlin, chair of the Business Law Section, fears a "rush to judgment" is underway to resolve the complex issues surrounding multidisciplinary practices.

In a September 21 seven-page letter to Martin Garcia, co-chair of the MDP/Ancillary Business Committee, Berlin wrote: "I am as anxious as everyone else to find a resolution on this issue, and I understand that every day that goes by we are allowing our position in the marketplace to be compromised. However, if we are not deliberate in our consideration of this issue, any outcome will be severely compromised and subject to criticism and easily discarded."

The clash on how the process should be carried out boils down to this: Berlin wants to gather more facts in order to define the issues, but Garcia wants to define the issues before gathering more empirical evidence.

Berlin wants at least one, if not more, all-day public hearings where people are invited to testify; another All Bar Conference on MDPs and expanded time in future meetings to hear other professionals address the full committee.

But in a September 30 response letter from Garcia and co-chair Richard Gilbert, they wrote that past efforts have proven that "gathering facts before identifying the issues is putting the cart before the horse."

The co-chairs say they are trying to learn from past mistakes.

"The initial efforts by our predecessor committee did indeed approach the subject by first attempting to gather empirical evidence. Specifically, the Ancillary Business Committee corresponded with committee and section leaders of the Bar requesting written evidence on issues relating to that subject matter. The committee also conducted a public hearing on the subject. These efforts were not very valuable in gathering meaningful information, and we believe the reason was that we did not first define the issues about which we were seeking empirical evidence," Garcia and Gilbert wrote.

Garcia elaborated in an interview: "First of all, Howard suggests that there is some sort of rush to judgment and some sort of refusal to gather empirical and factual evidence. There is no rush to judgment. We have a deadline to brief the issues. We did indeed have a public hearing and an All Bar Conference (in February). And the efforts to gather factual and empirical evidence unfortunately failed miserably. We didn't define the issues for the people. People didn't really understand what we meant by ancillary business. You put 10 people in a room...