Law School

Subscribe to Law School via RSS

The depth of everyone’s knowledge varies from subject to subject. I have a deep understanding of many areas of securities law, but a very shallow understanding of physics. (I’m not even in the wading pool.) But, even in subjects I teach—business associations, securities law, accounting for lawyers—the depth of my knowledge varies from topic to topic.

When I’m teaching the Securities Act registration exemptions, my knowledge base is very deep. I research and write primarily in that area. I know the law. I know the lore. I know the policy.
In other areas, my knowledge is much shallower. In some cases, I know just enough to teach the class. My business associations class sometimes touches on entity taxation issues, but I’m far from an expert on entity taxation. (My tax colleagues would say “far, far, far.”)

One’s knowledge deepens over time, of course. That’s one of the great joys of becoming an expert, whether you’re a law professor or a practitioner. I know more now about every topic I teach (including entity taxation) than I knew when I began teaching 27 years ago.

Several years ago, I decided to teach a course on investment companies and investment advisers. I started…

One of my pet peeves when I was in practice was working with junior lawyers or student interns who refused to take a position on anything when I asked for research. Perhaps because of the way law schools teach students, they tended to answer almost every question with “on the one hand but on the other hand.” This particularly frustrated me during my in house counsel years when I was juggling demands from internal clients in over a dozen countries and just wanted to know an answer, or at least a recommendation. Over at Legal Skills Prof Blog and PrawfsBlawg, they lay part of the blame on issue spotting exams. I use issue spotting essay exams, so perhaps I am perpetuating the problem, but I find that students have a love-hate relationship with ambiguity. They like to be ambiguous in essays but hate ambiguity in multiple choice questions.

I just finished administering multiple choice exams to my civil procedure and business associations students. Typically, I use essays for midterms and a combination of testing techniques for the final exam. I’m not a fan of multiple choice because I believe that students can get lucky. On my final exams I…

Today in my Energy Law Seminar, I sprung an exercise on my class.  I gave each member of the class a confidentiality and non-disclosure agreement (NDA).  Half the class works for a venture fund and the other half works for a technology inventor who was seeking investment. (I give them some more details about the proposed deal the NDA would help facilitate. (The exercise is based on an issue I worked on some years ago.)

I instruct them to read the  NDA, then they can meet with others assigned the same side. They can come up with their negotiating points, then I turn them loose with the other side.  

I always enjoy watching students work like this.  They are forced to react, and it lets them be a little creative.  I also like this exercise, because it has multiple layers. They get to ask me me what they need to know for the business points, and I later get to talk to them about the options they may not have considered.  

I have done this a few times, and the students always negotiate what they see as the key issues. Their issue spotting is usually good, but they…

Social enterprise has made two relatively recent appearances in the mainstream media:

(1) David Brooks on “How to Leave a Mark” in the NYT.

(2) George Roberts on “Bringing a Business Approach to Doing Good” in the WSJ.

In addition, a few law schools have started focusing more on social enterprise, including through the Georgetown Social Enterprise and Nonprofit Clinic and the Social Enterprise Law Association at Harvard Law School. 

Interest in social enterprise is and has been increasing, but the legal frameworks could still use significant work as my co-blogger Joan Heminway noted last month.

It’s always nice to be validated. Day two into torturing my business associations students with basic accounting and corporate finance, I was able to post the results of a recent study about what they were learning and why. “Torture” is a strong word– I try to break up the lessons by showing up to the minute video clips about companies that they know to illustrate how their concepts apply to real life settings. But for some students it remains a foreign language no matter how many background YouTube videos I suggest, or how interesting the debate is about McDonalds and Shake Shack on CNBC.

My alma mater Harvard Law School surveyed a number of BigLaw graduates about the essential skills and coursework for both transactional and litigation practitioners. As I explained in an earlier post, most of my students will likely practice solo or in small firms. But I have always believed that the skills sets are inherently the same regardless of the size of the practice or resources of the client. My future litigators need to know what documents to ask for in discovery and what questions to ask during the deposition of a financial expert. My family…

In response to my earlier post entitled “So . . . You Think You Want a Business Law Job . . . .,” a reader commented as follows:

I have also seen the shift of students in my college going from other areas of law into corporate law. . . . What advice in general would you offer up? Is it a good, secure job market to want to get into in this economy?

My initial response was that, ” . . . in general I would not suggest that anyone become a lawyer of any kind merely because it is a good job in this or any other economy. You should want to be a lawyer before venturing off to law school.”  

Bottom line: the market for business law or any other legal jobs is not a uniformly good, secure job market.  Law school is not and never has been a “job ticket” in any case.  But those who have a desire to be business lawyers and work intelligently and diligently at finding a job in business law typically will be business lawyers.  I undertook to post further this week.

So, what else shall I say to pre-law students and law students interested in business law?  I will be relatively brief here and in my posts for a number of weeks since I am typing with one hand (my left, non-dominant hand) due to a broken right wrist–an extra-articular distal radius, or Colles’, fracture.  But I invite further observations in the comments.

I’ve enjoyed getting to know a bit about University of Pennsylvania Psychology Professor Angela Duckworth’s work on “grit.” Duckworth and her co-authors call grit “perseverance and passion for long-term goals,” and they claim that grit can be predictive of certain types of success.  

Can we, as educators, teach grit? If so, how? Duckworth asks, but doesn’t fully answer these questions in her popular TED talk. She does, however, think Stanford Psychology Professor Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset, which I wrote about a few months ago, offers the most hope.

Do readers have any thoughts on this subject? Feel free to leave a comment or e-mail me your thoughts.

It may just be my students, but it seems there is a renewed interest in business law careers among law students.  Several of my students this year who had originally started down a path toward a career in another area of law have happily and passionately settled, somewhat late in the game, on being business lawyers.  Somehow, after taking Business Associations and other foundational business law courses, they’ve been bit by the business law bug.  And they are incredibly talented students–high up in their class in terms of rank and well worthy of employment in a firm or business or government.  One is my research assistant.

We have been working together and with the folks in our Career Center to identify relevant geographical and employer markets.  But I am seemingly engaged in a continuous struggle to help each of them (a) to enhance his resume to reflect his new-found business law passion (given that each already had accepted a second summer job somewhat or totally outside the business law area when he refocused on business law as a career path) and (b) to make the new connections that he needs to make in order to successfully pursue his revised career path.  How can a middle-aged academic almost 15 years out of practice help a 3L business law job-seeker to make his resume more relevant, his contact list deeper, and his interviews more effective?

As one of Belmont University’s pre-law advisors, I have been getting an increasing number of e-mails from law school representatives across the country who are trying to recruit our students. One thing that I have been pushing for is better employment data. For the most part, the law school representatives simply send me the ABA required data, which I can already find on my own. 

The ABA required data is somewhat helpful to me as an advisor, but the data is insufficient. We really need better salary data and complete (or near complete) employer/job title lists. Longitudinal studies, though difficult to do well, might be interesting.  

The ABA required data tells us how many of a law school’s graduates for a given year are employed in law firm jobs, judicial clerkships, government, public interest work, etc. The ABA data does not distinguish between an associate attorney position (~$160,000 + prestige + career mobility) and a staff attorney position (~$50,000 + no prestige + dead end, in most cases) at the same large firm – assuming both are full-time, long-term positions, which they can be. While I readily admit that salary is often not the most important part of a…

My seventy business associations students work in law firms on group projects. Law students, unlike business students, don’t particularly like group work at first, even though it requires them to use the skills they will need most as lawyers—the abilities to negotiate, influence, listen, and compromise. Today, as they were doing their group work on buy-sell agreements for an LLC, I started drafting today’s blog post in which I intended to comment on co-blogger Joan Heminway’s post earlier this week about our presentation at Emory on teaching transactional law.

While I was drafting the post, I saw, ironically, an article featuring Professor Michelle Harner, the author of the very exercise that my students were working on. The article discussed various law school programs that were attempting to instill business skills in today’s law students. Most of the schools were training “practice ready” lawyers for big law firms and corporations. I have a different goal. My students will be like most US law school graduates and will work in firms of ten lawyers or less. If they do transactional work, it will likely be for small businesses.  Accordingly, despite my BigLaw and in-house background, I try to focus a lot…