Sponsorship can be a tricky business, as London-based magic circle law firm Allen & Overy discovered recently. It was one of the generous backers of last week's conference in Brussels of the American Bar Association's (ABA) international section. Of course, sponsorship is never purely altruistic, and the main benefit of the deal was that A&O lawyers popped up on just about every panel going. And the firm got a big plug at the conference reception from ABA section chairman Michael Byowitz, an anti-trust specialist partner at Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz in New York, who joked, 'as far as we're all concerned here, Allen & Overy is a Belgian firm'. Now Obiter has nothing against les belges - and we can even think of one or two famous examples of the breed &150; although we can't imagine that the firm itself would necessarily want to be completely and only associated with the Low Country. Indeed, on the night an A&O lawyer jumped to the stage to thank the ABA and to point out that 'we view A&O as being a truly global law firm'.