As I continue my (futile?) quest to exhaust my electronic reading pile before the fall semester begins, I recently read a nice article on business lawyering: Praveen Kosuri, Beyond Gilson: The Art of Business Lawyering, 19 LEWIS & CLARK L. REV. 463 (2013), also available on SSRN here.
Kosuri asks what distinguishes great business lawyers, and develops a three-tiered pyramid of the skills that transactional business lawyers need. At the bottom of the pyramid are what Kosuri calls foundational skills: reading and understanding contracts; research and drafting; financial literacy; and a basic knowledge of business law. The next level of the pyramid, which Kosuri calls transitional skills, includes negotiation; structuring deals; risk management; and transaction cost engineering. The top level of the pyramid, which Kosuri calls optimal skills, includes understanding business; understanding people; problem-solving; and advising.
Kosuri then considers who would be best at teaching each of those categories of skills and how to teach them. I don’t agree with everything he says, but the article is insightful and certainly worth reading.
Here’s the abstract:
Thirty years ago, Ronald Gilson asked the question, “what do business lawyers really do?” Since that time legal scholars have continued to grapple with that question and the implicit question of how business lawyers add value to their clients. This article revisits the question again but with a more expansive perspective on the role of business lawyer and what constitutes value to clients.
Gilson put forth the theory of business lawyers as transaction cost engineers. Years later, Karl Okamoto introduced the concept of deal lawyer as reputational intermediary. Steven Schwarcz attempted to isolate the role of business lawyer from other advisors and concluded the only value lawyers added was as regulatory cost managers. All of these conceptions of business lawyering focused too narrowly on the technical skills employed, and none captured the skill set or essence of the truly great business lawyer. In this article, I put forth a more fully developed conception of business lawyer that highlights skills that differentiate great business lawyers from the merely average. I then discuss whether these skills can be taught in law schools and how a tiered curriculum might be designed to better educate future business lawyers.