A number of months back, the Business Law Prof Blog hosted a series of five posts by Marcos Antonio Mendoza (here, here, here, here, and here) that were quite popular.  He wrote about (among other things) the need to educate students for the evolving roles in which they may serve as corporate counsel.  His recent article on corporate counsel.com offers much food for thought along those lines and serves as a good reminder, as we head into a new semester, of what our students may need long-term in the workplace.  In both this article and his earlier BLPB posts, Marcos is reacting to an academic research paper, "Finding the Right Corporate Legal Strategy" (available to subscribers or for purchase), published last year in the MIT Sloan Management Review by Professor Robert C. Bird of the University of Connecticut School of Business and Professor David Orozco from the Florida State University College of Business.

Although you all should read Marcos's Corporate Counsel article (and his posts) for yourselves, I will offer a few quotes from the article and related law school instruction take-aways here.  These largely repeat and reframe Marcos's own observations in his BLPB posts.

• "[T]he most successful companies determine which of five legal strategies is the most effective in their legal environment, and then deploy their legal resources to accomplish their goals." The five legal strategies are avoidance, compliance, prevention, value, and transformation.  We would be doing our students a great service in identifying and explaining these five strategies and showing the students how legal doctrine, theory, and policy connect with the strategies.
• "One of the most effective ways for companies to promote . . . attorney education [about business issues] is through job rotations, in which counsel are temporarily assigned to managerial positions in the business units they support."  Courses in the standard law school curriculum–and even new offerings focusing on business skills (e.g., reading and interpreting financial statements)–obviously do not (cannot) serve this function, although some clinic and simulation experiences offer students a limited exposure to business issues.  We should consider designing field placements, internships, externships, etc. for business law students to give them some quality, sustained exposure to business issues.
• "[E]xecutives should create a cross-functional strategic team composed of lawyers and operational business managers who are guided by the chief legal strategist. The team’s responsibility is to hypothesize legal strategies that have a clear impact on a profit-loss statement."  Can we model these strategic teams for our students? Can a consciously constructed curricular or co-curricular program with a business school (easier to accomplish for those of us in universities) offer a useful experience of this kind to our students?

Again, as we finalize course planning and syllabi for (and, in general, think about) the new semester, the types of educational experiences identified by Marcos in his earlier posts–including those highlighted here–are well worth bearing in mind.