I’m knee deep in grading my business associations exams and so far, I’m pretty pleased. Maybe it’s my in-house background, but I spend a lot of time with my students getting them to focus on providing strategic advice to their fictional clients because that’s what my former clients demanded. My operations and executive colleagues complained that lawyers didn’t understand business or their pressure points and offered legal advice without thinking of the big picture or strategic considerations. With that in mind, my students work in law firms and do a variety of exercises from Michelle Harner’s skills book. When they answer questions in class based on cases or drafting exercises, I force them to think like a client rather than just the lawyer. I drill into them the importance of speaking to their clients in plain English, and I tell them if they can’t break the concepts down in their own words, then they don’t really understand them. Their final exam required them to advise a number of different clients based on the same fact pattern, and I am enjoying reading the different strategies that my 69 students devised based upon the same set of facts.

I get a break from teaching BA next semester but I will be thinking of other ways to teach my students to think like clients. I’ve recently read an article by Professor Alicia J. Davis from Michigan, who uses the HBS case study method in her advanced courses. I agree with her assertion that one drawback is that most law students lack the work experience and business knowledge to understand some of the concepts, but I may adopt some of her methods since my students work in law firms already, which is ideal for this method. The abstract of her article is below:

For the past twenty-five years, my academic and professional pursuits have straddled the line between business and law. I majored in business administration in college and then worked as an analyst in the Corporate Finance department at a bulge bracket Wall Street firm. After completing a JD/MBA, I returned to investment banking with a focus on middle-market mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and subsequently practiced law with a focus on private equity and M&A. Finally, in 2004, I found my current home as a corporate law professor. In my courses, which include Mergers & Acquisitions, Enterprise Organization, and Investor Protection, I strive to teach my students the substantive law, the ethics surrounding the practice of law, the nuts and bolts of how to execute transactions, and how corporations can be better world citizens. Though imparting those skills is a significant undertaking in and of itself, it is not enough. I also want my students to appreciate the underlying business rationales for the transactions we discuss in class and to begin to develop an intuition for sound business strategy. 

A basic understanding of a client’s business, of course, aids with traditional transactional lawyering tasks, such as due diligence, negotiating a deal, and drafting acquisition agreements. For example, if a lawyer knows that her client’s acquisition target derives forty percent of its revenue from a particular customer, she will pay particular attention to that customer’s contracts with the target during her due diligence review. She also will draft the M&A agreement’s target representations and warranties section so that her client receives contractual assurances of full disclosure about the status of those customer contracts. However, in my teaching, I strive to go beyond giving my students this basic understanding. Perhaps I am too ambitious, but I want more for my students than understanding just enough about business to draft merger agreement provisions effectively. I want them to begin to develop the ability to serve as lawyers who provide legal advice in a strategic context.