Teaching

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The internet age has brought tremendous access to information.  As kids, many of us were used to the familiar refrain from our parents, “Go look it up.”  That meant getting out a dictionary or the Encyclopedia Britannica (volumes of books) to see if we could figure out unique facts about the Tasmanian Devil (my fourth-grade report subject), which is “the world’s largest carnivorous marsupial.”   Things have changed.

Today, telling someone to look it up means a trip to the computer, and probably Google, Bing, Yahoo or some other search engine.  Maybe it could mean a news service like the New York Times, and of course Westlaw, LexisNexis, or Bloomberg for legal issues. If I needed any evidence things have changed for all of us, I recently asked my nine-year-old son to put the “word book” he got out to help with his homework. He looked at me and asked, “You mean the dictionary?”  Um, yeah.  

Anyway, with all this information at our fingertips, I am regularly amazed how often I could tell people to, “Look it up.”  Students regularly ask me questions that they could easily look up themselves, and it happens with colleagues or vendors…

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?

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…

I am a list maker.  I make daily to do lists, grocery lists, research plans, workout schedules (that quickly get jettisoned) and  complicated child care matrices necessary in two-career families.  How else am I supposed to remember and keep on my radar all of the things that I am supposed to be doing now, or doing when I have time, or things that I can’t forget to do in the future?  One area where I feel deficient is in planning my conference travel/attendance. It always feels either a little ad hoc (ohh I got an invitation and I never say no to those!) or a little out habit (once you have presented at a conference it is easier to be asked to participate in future panels). Rarely does it feel like a part of an intentional plan for the year where I set out to prioritize conference A or break into conference B.  

Realizing that this year there are 3 corporate law events within 10 days of each other is seriously making me reconsider my approach.  I need a conference list– a way to plan for the coming year, prioritize opportunities and frankly, schedule grandparent visits…

On December 22 and again on January 9, I posted the first two installments of a three-part series featuring the wit and wisdom of my former student, Brandon Whiteley, who successfully organized a student group to draft, propose, and instigate passage of Invest Tennessee, a state crowdfunding bill in Tennessee.  The first post featured Brandon’s observations on the legislative process, and the second post addressed key influences on the bill-that-became-law.  This post, as earlier promised, includes Brandon’s description of the important role that communication played in the Invest Tennessee endeavor.  Here’s what he related to me in that regard (as before, slightly edited for republication here).

Students, want to learn more in law school? Look back, not just forward. As the semester begins, instead of focusing solely on the new classes you’re taking, review the exams you took last semester. Those exams aren’t just for assigning you a grade; you can also use them as a learning tool.

Read the exam questions and your answers. Look at the professor’s comments on your exam and any model answers the professor has provided. What did you get wrong? What in the course did you misunderstand? If some areas are still unclear to you, make an appointment with the professor and review the exam with him or her.

If you do that, you’ll have a much better understanding of the courses you took than if you let your learning stop at the end of your final moment of exam preparation. Professors constantly reevaluate what we know and whether we’re right; you should too. You don’t want to carry that B grade into your legal career; you want to be an A lawyer. If you review your exams, you emerge from that review process with a better understanding of the subject matter.

You might think you’ll never use that material…

For the last three years, I have been teaching my Accounting for Lawyers course as a distance education course. It’s only available to students at my law school, but everything except the final exam is online; there are no in-person classes. I think it’s worked well, better than the in-person accounting class I used to teach, but that’s a topic for another day. Today, I want to talk about four things I’ve learned teaching the course.

1. Law students are not used to “learning as they go.”

The typical law school class involves a single end-of-semester exam, and law students get used to pulling things together by cramming at the end of the semester. Almost all of my students read the daily assignments, but many of them, even some of the most conscientious students, really haven’t actively wrestled with the material.

I usually teach by the problem method, and I use books with a large number of problems. I strongly urge students to answer those problems before class. Almost all of my students read the problems before class; many of them think about the problems before class; but it’s clear that few of them have thoroughly worked their way through…

I have just returned from Dublin, which may be one of my new favorite cities. For the fifth year in a row, I have had the pleasure of participating as a mentor in the LawWithoutWalls (“LWOW”) program run by University of Miami with sponsorship from the Eversheds law firm. LWOW describes itself as follows:

LawWithoutWalls, devised and led by Michele DeStefano, is a part-virtual, global, multi-disciplinary collaboratory that focuses on tackling the cutting edge issues at the intersection of law, business, technology, and innovation.  LawWithoutWalls mission is to accelerate innovation in legal education and practice at the same time.  We collaborate with 30 law and business schools and over 450 academics, students, technologists, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, business professionals, and lawyers from around the world. We seek to change how today’s lawyers approach their practice and how tomorrow’s lawyers are educated and, in so doing, sharpen the skills needed to meet the challenges posed by the economic pressures, technologization, and globalization of the international legal market. We seek to create the future of law, today. Utilizing a blend of virtual and in-person techniques, LawWithoutWalls offers six initiatives: LWOW Student Offerings,LWOW Live, LWOW INC., and LWOW Xed…

Today, unlike most Mondays during the school year, I will not be in the classroom.  The University of Tennessee is closed in celebration of the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., our nation’s iconic non-violent civil rights leader.  Today also is the day that my daughter is in transit back to her college in New York for her last semester as an undergraduate.  It seemed only fitting, honoring both occasions, to go out on Friday night with my daughter and my husband to see the movie Selma.

Despite its historical inaccuracies (which have been played out in the public media, e.g., here), the movie is a successful one.  Among other things, it spoke to me of the amazing amount that one man can accomplish in a mere 39 years with focus, action, and perseverance.  I admittedly felt a bit lazy and ineffectual by comparison.

Selma also reminded me, however, of the near daily opportunities that King had to speak out on matters of public importance.  I wondered if there was anything in his teachings that would speak directly to me today.  Specifically, I wondered if I could find something he’d said that helped to guide me as a business law professor in the current business law or legal education environment.

Of course, King spoke out against  Jim Crow laws, which provided for legal segregation of the races in both businesses and education.  But I was looking for something a bit more personal.  Then, I found this quotation:  “The function of education . . . is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. . . .  Intelligence plus character–that is the goal of true education.”  

Every U.S. law school, or at least every law school I’m aware of, offers a securities regulation course. But those courses usually focus on the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. A typical securities regulation course covers the definition of security, materiality, the registration of securities offerings under the Securities Act, and liability issues under both the Securities Act and the Exchange Act. If the professor is ambitious, those courses may also cover the regulation of securities markets and broker-dealers.

Almost none of those basic securities regulation courses spends any significant time on the 1940 Acts—the Investment Company Act and the Investment Advisers Act. It’s not because those two statutes are unimportant. A good proportion of American investment is through mutual funds and other regulated investment companies, not to mention hedge funds which depend upon Investment Company Act exemptions. And the investment advisory business is booming. When I attend gatherings of securities lawyers, I’m always amazed at how many of the lawyers present are dealing with issues under the 1940 Acts.

The lack of coverage of the 1940 Acts in the basic securities law course would be acceptable if law schools offered separate, stand-alone courses…