Wait, maybe I do want to be a lawyer....

• Author: Dinwoodie, Jason S.
• Position: Message from the Editor - Editorial

Whenever I make an introductory presentation to summer or first-year associates about the resources available to them through my firm's marketing department, or in training sessions on the topic of "Building a Business Development Pipeline," I often start with a corny joke (of sorts).The joke basically goes "I bet you never thought that in your first week as a lawyer you were going to be hearing from a marketing person. After all, isn't the reason why you all went to law school, precisely because you didn't want to have to do all that 'sales stuff' in a traditional corporation?"

The most recent round of ethics and advertising regulations almost made me consider going over to join them as lawyers (even though when I got my JD years ago I swore I never wanted to deal with this precedent stuff ever again, much like most lawyers don't want to deal with this sales stuff).

Being a lawyer is almost a necessity in our business today in order to decipher all the rules, exceptions to the rules, subtle variations to the rules between states, interpretive ethics opinions and the myriads of individual opinions about what is and is not advertising, solicitations, information, persuasion or plain tomfoolery.

It's hardly surprising that in an industry meant to provide airtight legal solutions we seem to be painting ourselves into a corner when it comes to crafting regulations governing business development activity. Make no mistake, the regulations don't stop with advertising--consider the prohibitions against fee sharing with non-lawyers and their impact (or non-impact depending on how you look at it) for the future prospects of paying business developers "sales commissions" or for a U.S. firm to undertake an IPO as a firm did last month in Australia (and is likely to be able to do in the UK a few years from now).

I have heard some hinge comparisons between the Hippocratic Oath that physicians subscribe to and the ethical rules governing lawyers (and I'm not quite sure that this is an "apples to apples" comparison) on the theory that the Hippocratic Oath seems more concerned with protecting the patient and legal ethics rules more concerned with protecting the profession. I think such a comparison goes a bit too far, as there is certainly a great deal to the rules that are...