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Committing Firm Resources to a Proposed Ancillary Business: A Checklist

By Joe Danowsky
August 12, 2003

The following discussion and checklist are based on guidance provided in Beyond Legal Practice: Organizing and Managing Ancillary Businesses. Thanks are due to The Hildebrandt Institute and author James W. Jones for permission to adapt their material. For details on this currently very popular booklet, see Hildebrandt's website, www.hildebrandtinstitute.com. (We're looking forward to more Hildebrandt advice on ancillary businesses: another topic from this popular booklet will be expanded upon in a future edition of the A&FP newsletter.)

What Makes a Business Ancillary?

As defined by Rule 5.7 of the ABA's Model Rules of Professional Conduct, ancillary businesses are those providing 'law-related services.' Rule 5.7 defines law-related services as those that 'might reasonably be performed in conjunction with and in substance are related to the provision of legal services and that are not prohibited as unauthorized practice of law when provided by a nonlawyer.' Citing Hazard & Hodes book The Law of Lawyering: A Handbook on the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, author Jones suggests that a law-related service is one a layperson might reasonably mistake for legal services if he or she saw a lawyer performing them. [Ed. note: By this clever heuristic, an ethics board would declare a proposed ancillary business legitimate specifically because a reasonable onlooker would misperceive it ' an unusual criterion indeed!]

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