By: George C. Nnona
Multidisciplinary Practice (MDP) implicates inter-professional
competition between lawyers and other professions, principally the
accounting profession. In meeting the challenges of MDP as a threat
from the accounting profession, the legal profession has operated
from a relatively weak position. In analyzing the legal
profession’s relative weakness in the struggle, legal commentators
have characterized them as the result of a recent need by
well-heeled global accounting firms to expand their professional
territory by usurping aspects of the lawyer’s traditional
functions, especially in the face of dwindling revenues from more
traditional accounting functions. This characterization over
simplifies a more complex story.
This paper offers an alternative explanation—a different
analysis—that accounts for the legal profession’s relative weakness
in systemic terms. It accounts for the emergence of MDP and the
legal profession’s relative weakness by locating MDP, its origins
and animating factors within social history. The paper effectively
argues that the distinct trajectories of both professions’
evolution have conditioned them differently, in a way that
predisposes the legal profession to weakness in the struggle for
professional ascendancy, which MDP represents. The paper thus
provides a perspective of MDP that enables a more nuanced
appreciation of the causes and implications of MDP than has
previously been the case.