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This weekend I will be in Panama filling in at the last minute for the corporate law session for an executive LLM progam. My students are practicing lawyers from Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Paraguay and have a variety of legal backgrounds. My challenge is to fit key corporate topics (other than corporate governance, compliance, M & A, finance, and accounting) into twelve hours over two days for people with different knowledge levels and experiences. The other faculty members hail from law schools here and abroad as well as BigLaw partners from the United States and other countries.

Prior to joining academia I spent several weeks a year training/teaching my internal clients about legal and compliance matters for my corporation. This required an understanding of US and host country concepts. I have also taught in executive MBA programs and I really enjoyed the rich discussion that comes from students with real-world practical experience. I know that I will have that experience again this weekend even though I will probably come back too brain dead to be coherent for my civil procedure and business associations classes on Tuesday.

I have put together a draft list of topics with the help…

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…

I am sure that many of you, like me, are deluged with email messages at this point in the year from well-meaning students taking your fall courses who ask whether a particular text–or version of a text–marked as “required” on the book list is really required. There are many ways to respond to these requests.  A number of my my Facebook friends–including former students–suggest a simple response, something akin to: “What part of required do you not understand?”

While that kind of a response sometimes is very appealing (especially when I get two emails asking about this kind of thing on the same day), I have decided to use these interactions as a teaching moment–of sorts. Set forth below is a version of a message that I send, in case it is of some use to you in this or another similar context. The specific inquiry to which I am responding relates to a student’s question about using a 2013 “statutory supplement” in my Fall 2015 Business Associations course.

Hey, [name of student]. Thanks for reaching out to me. This is a common question. It has an easy (although perhaps unpalatable) answer. I marked the 2015 statutory resource book (not…

Joan Heminway’s post last week about comparative corporate law  got me thinking about international coverage in my own courses. Joan’s post reviewed a book designed for a stand-alone comparative corporate law course, but I’ve been wondering whether we should include more comparative material in the basic business associations and securities regulation courses.

The case for discussing the corporate and securities law of other countries is clear. Capital markets are becoming increasingly global. U.S. companies are selling securities in other countries and U.S. investors are investing in foreign companies. Initially, globalization affected primarily large multinational companies, but with the expanding use of the Internet to sell securities, even the smallest business can offer securities to investors in other countries.

Under the internal affairs rule, it’s the corporate law of the country of incorporation that’s important, no matter where the lawyer is practicing or where the corporation or the shareholder is located. And a company selling securities to investors outside the U.S. needs to consider the effect of other countries’ securities laws. Foreign counsel may be retained to deal with such issues, but shouldn’t the U.S. lawyer have at least a rudimentary understanding of foreign corporate and securities laws and how…

Last week I attended a panel discussion with angel investors and venture capitalists hosted by Refresh Miami. Almost two hundred entrepreneurs and tech professionals attended the summer startup series to learn the inside scoop on fundraising from panelists Ed Boland, Principal Scout Ventures; Stony Baptiste, Co-Founder & Principal, Urban.Us, Venture Fund; Brad Liff, Founder & CEO, Fitting Room Social, Private Equity Expert; and (the smartest person under 30 I have ever met) Herwig Konings, Co-Founder & CEO of Accredify, Crowd Funding Expert. Because I was typing so fast on my iPhone, I didn’t have time to attribute my notes to the speakers. Therefore, in no particular order, here are the nuggets I managed to glean from the panel.

1) In the seed stage, it’s more than an idea but less than a business. If it’s before true market validation you are in the seed round. At the early stage, there has been some form of validation, but the business is not yet sustainable. Everything else beyond that is the growth stage.

2) The friend and family round is typically the first $50-75,000. Angels come in the early stage and typically invest up to $500,000.

3)…

My friend and corporate law colleague Marco Ventoruzzo (Penn State Law and Bocconi University) recently let me know that he and several others–Pierre-Henri Conac, Gen Goto, Sebastian Mock, Mario Notari, and Arad Reisberg–have published a coauthored teaching text entitled (and focused on) Comparative Corporate Law.  As someone who has taught that subject (as well as comparative and cross-border mergers and acquisitions) in the past, I have been very interested in taking a look at the book–the first of its kind, as far as I know.  Luckily, I was able to grab a review copy from the publisher, West Academic Publishing (American Casebook Series), at the Southeastern Association of Law Schools (SEALS) conference, which I am attending this week.  This post shares a bit about the book (based on a relatively quick examination–peeking more closely into some chapters than others) and my ideas for teaching from it.  

I recommend the book and would use it in a course I would teach on the subject matter.  The content is really wonderful.  Nearly everything I need as a foundation for a course in comparative or cross-border corporate law is included.  However, I have a few general criticisms, primarily based on my personal teaching perspective, that I will note in this post.

For a university discussion group this summer, I read William Deresiewicz’s book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (2014).

Deresiewicz, a former Yale English professor, caused quite a stir in higher education circles with his Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League article in the New Republic (and other articles in various outlets), which promoted Excellent Sheep pre-publication.

Deresiewicz’s attack on the ivy league can be summarized as follows:

  • Encourages a system that leads to resume-padding instead of authentic learning and service
  • Too much focus on future financial success and not enough focus on life’s big questions
  • Not enough socioeconomic diversity
  • Faculty preoccupied with research and do not spend enough time on teaching/service
  • Risk-taking is not encouraged; error for margin for students is too small
  • Coursework not rigorous enough
  • Students are kept doing busy-work rather than allowed to explore
  • Encourages a system that can lead to depression, isolation, etc. 

Deresiewicz taught at Yale for 10 years and was supposedly denied tenure in 2008. When I found out that Deresiewicz’s was denied tenure, I was tempted to write off his book as sour grapes, but I think it best…

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW seeks to expand its academic program and its strong commitment to scholarship by hiring multiple exceptional faculty candidates for tenure-track or tenured positions, with rank dependent on qualifications and experience.  Candidates must have a J.D. degree or its equivalent.  Preference will be given to those with demonstrated outstanding scholarly achievement and strong classroom teaching skills.  Successful candidates will be expected to teach and engage in research and service.  While the law school welcomes applications in all subject areas, it particularly invites applications from:

1)    Candidates who are interested in building synergies with Texas A&M University’s Mays Business School, with an emphasis on scholars engaged in international business law who focus on cross-border transactions, trade, and economic law (finance, investments, dispute resolution, etc.);

2)    Candidates who are interested in building synergies with the broad mission of Texas A&M University’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, which include but are not limited to scholars engaged in agricultural law (including regulatory issues surrounding agriculture), rural law, community development law, food law, ecosystem sciences, and forensic evidence; and

3)    Visionary leaders in experiential education interested in guiding our existing Intellectual Property and Technology Law Clinic (with concentrations in…

For a number of years now, I have been using group (3-person teams) oral midterm examinations in my Business Associations course.  I have found these examinations to be an effective and rewarding assessment tool based on my teaching and learning objectives for this course.  At the invitation of the Saint Louis University Law Journal, as part of a featured edition of the journal on teaching business associations law, I prepared a short article giving folks the “why, how, and what” of my experience in taking this approach to midterm assessment.  The article was recently published, and I have posted it to SSRN.  The abstract reads as follows:

I focus in this Article on a particular way to assess student learning in a Business Associations course. Those of us involved in legal education for the past few years know that “assessment” has been a buzzword . . . or a bugaboo . . . or both. The American Bar Association (ABA) has focused law schools on assessment (institutional and pedagogical), and that focus is not, in my view, misplaced. Until relatively recently, much of student assessment in law school doctrinal courses was rote behavior, seemingly driven by heuristics and…

I’ve always been eager to do pro bono work. I went to law school with the intent of helping the indigent upon graduation, but then with a six-figure debt load, I went to BigLaw in New York and Miami, and then corporate America so that I could pay that debt off. But even as an associate and as in house counsel, I dutifully accepted pro bono cases. As a relatively new academic, I paid my way out of pro bono for the first couple of years as Florida allows and assuaged my guilt with the knowledge that my payments were going to fund the local legal aid office.

This year, as a condition of attending a family law CLE for free, I volunteered to take a case. I’ve devoted over 70 hours to it thus far, and we still aren’t finished even after today’s marathon 6.5 hour hearing dealing with a motion for contempt and enforcement, modification of alimony and child support, a QDRO (qualified domestic relations order), and a house in foreclosure. The case was complicated even according to my seasoned family law practitioner friends.

As a former litigator and current BA professor, I found that my skills helped…