As increasing amounts of money pours into sport, a growing number of lawyers are following. Bird & Bird's Max Duthie charts the rise of the sports adviser

In 1998, when I first started practising as a sports lawyer, it was still something of a novelty as a career – in the UK at least.

Back then, relatively few law firms worked in sport consistently, with much of the legal work in the sector being done ad hoc by lawyers who were specialists in other areas of the law, servicing the occasional sports client when it was necessary. And at that time there was generally a lot less lawyering done in sport, so the market did not require many sports law specialists.