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Now that I am teaching MBA courses in negotiation, I see negotiations everywhere.

For example, in reading about the extremely interesting NLRB ruling in favor of the Northwestern University football players – holding that the players are “employees” and can unionize – I came across this Sports Illustrated article:  Northwestern ruling sends clear message: NCAA, it’s time to negotiate.

Former Northwestern quarterback Kain Colter does a nice job articulating some of the interests from the players’ side of things in this video.

Given this ruling, which will be appealed, and the O’Bannon v. NCAA case which is set for trial on June 9, there is likely to be a great deal of negotiation between the NCAA and players outside of the courtroom over the next few months.  As the cases move closer to potential resolutions in favor of the players, the NCAA’s BATNA (best alternative to a negotiation) weakens.   The NCAA, however, may raise doubts about the players’ BATNA, by raising things like the possible tax implications of a court victory.

These will be complex, multi-party, multi-issue negotiations.  The parties with interests at stake include current and former players, coaches and athletic directors, colleges and universities, the…

It’s proxy season and the Conference Board has released a series of reports on investor engagement and corporate governance. In “The Conference Board Governance Center White Paper: What is the Optimal Balance in the Relative Roles of Management, Directors, and Investors in the Governance of Public Corporations?” the authors provide a 76-page overview of the evolution of US corporate governance, describing key trends and issues.

The report begins by discussing the history of the allocation of roles and responsibilities for governance of public companies. If I thought my law students would read it, I would assign this section to them.  The second part of the paper addresses the legal, social and market trends that have influenced the historical allocation of rights. Specifically, it reviews:

a) the increasing influence of institutional investors resulting from the concentration of ownership in institutional investment, changes in voting rules and practices and more assertive shareholder activism;

b) shifting conceptions about the purpose of the corporation and the duty to maximize corporate value, with a strong emphasis on shareholder wealth maximization;

c) decreased public trust of business leaders following the corporate scandals of 2001-2002 and 2007-2008;

d) federal regulation intended to enhance the influence of shareholders…

Passing on this announcement for those interested in teaching business and human rights or learning more about it. I had the opportunity to meet many of the professors who teach in this area at the UN Conference on Business and Human Rights in Geneva in December and they and outside counsel from around the world discussed the need for more law and business students to understand these issues so that graduates could advise clients of all sizes. Contact Anthony Ewing from Columbia Law for more information.
 
Teaching Business and Human RightsWorkshop
Thursday and Friday, May 15-16th, 2014
Columbia University, New York, NY
 
We are pleased to announce that the fourth annual Teaching Business and Human Rights Workshop will take place at Columbia University in New York on Thursday andFriday, May 15-16th, 2014.
 
History
The Columbia Teaching Business and HumanRights Forum is a unique platform for collaboration among individuals teaching business and human rights worldwide. The first Workshop, in 2011, led to the creation of an Online Forum that has grown to include more than 175 participants in twenty-five countries. Last year’s Workshop convened forty individuals teaching at thirty-one institutions in ten countries. Discussion Summaries of the first three Forum Workshops are available on the website of the Business and Human RightsResource Centre. 
 
Agenda
This year’s agenda based on Forum participant

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Most professors I know are asked some version of the title question by their students on a relatively regular basis.

  • Will this be on the exam?
  • Will this in-class exercise be graded?
  • Will we get extra credit for this outside event you recommended?

When I was a student I may have asked some of these same questions, and as a professor, I gladly answer these questions.  For some reason, however, I have a silent, negative visceral reaction to these questions, and I know many other professors who feel similarly.

This week, with my family on spring break in North Carolina, I have been pondering why I have such a negative reaction. I think my reaction is not because there is anything inherently wrong with the questions, but because I desperately want my students to understand that, ultimately, our classes are (or should be) about something much more important than just a grade.  A grade should approximate the level of mastery and the components of the grade should be as clear as possible, but many of the things that students should be developing — critical thinking, intellectual curiosity, compassion, perseverance, professionalism, ethics, etc. — are difficult to fully capture in a…

Some law professors may remember when Justices Roberts and Kennedy opined on the value legal scholarship. Justice Roberts indicated in an interview that law professors spend too much time writing long law review articles about “obscure” topics.  Justice Kennedy discussed the value he derives from reading blog posts by professors who write about certs granted and opinions issued. I have no doubt that most law students don’t look at law review articles unless they absolutely have to and I know that when I was a practicing lawyer both as outside counsel and as in house counsel, I almost never relied upon them. If I was dealing with a cutting-edge issue, I looked to bar journals, blog posts and case law unless I had to review legislative history.

As a new academic, I enjoy reading law review articles regularly and I read blog posts all the time. I know that outside counsel  read blogs too, in part because now they’re also blogging and because sometimes counsel will email me to ask about a blog post. I encourage my students to follow bloggers and to learn the skill because one day they may need to blog for their own firms or for…

West Virginia University has a new LLM program in Energy & Sustainable Development Law. At the moment, the program is open only to those with a U.S. law degree.  The degree program capitalizes on a wide and deep range of expertise at WVU Law in a one of the nation’s most energy-rich states.  (Full bias  disclosure: I direct the program.)

All students in the program are required to take both the Energy Law Survey and the Environmental Protection Law course. This is because we firmly believe that all lawyers connected to the energy sector need to have a firm grasp on both energy law issues and  envirnonmental law issues. Both courses touch on each other’s area, but having both courses as a base will lead to better prepared professionals, whether the graduate wants to work for industry, an NGO, or a regulator. 

We also require some form of experiential learning, a portfolio of written work, and a Research Paper or Field-Work Project. Full details of the program are here.  For this venue, and in my area of interest, I will note our business offerings.  I teach my Energy Business: Law & Strategy course, details here, in addition to my…

Business law has a broad overlap with tax, accounting, and finance.  Just how much belongs in a law school course is often a challenge to determine.  We all have different comfort levels and views on the issue, but incorporating some level of financial literacy is essential.  Fortunately, a more detailed discussion of what to include and how to include it is forthcoming.  Here’s the call: 

Call For Papers

AALS Section on Agency, Partnerships LLCs, and Unincorporated Associations

Bringing Numbers into Basic and Advanced Business Associations Courses: How and Why to Teach Accounting, Finance, and Tax

2015 AALS Annual Meeting Washington, DC

Business planners and transactional lawyers know just how much the “number-crunching” disciplines overlap with business law. Even when the law does not require unincorporated business associations and closely held corporations to adopt generally accepted accounting principles, lawyers frequently deal with tax implications in choice of entity, the allocation of ownership interests, and the myriad other planning and dispute resolution circumstances in which accounting comes into play. In practice, unincorporated business association law (as contrasted with corporate law) has tended to be the domain of lawyers with tax and accounting orientation. Yet many law professors still struggle with the reality…

Our BLPB group has had a number of email discussions recently about the use of social media including blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter for professional purposes. My home institution has discussed the same topic and even held a “training” session on technology in and outside of the classroom.  Because I am a heavy user, I volunteered to blog about how I use social media as a lawyer and academic in the hopes of spurring discussion or at least encouraging others to take a dip in the vast pool of social media.

Although I have been on Facebook for years, I don’t use that professionally at all. I also don’t allow my students to friend me, although I do know a number of professors who do. I often see lawyer friends discussing their clients or cases in a way that borders on violations of the rules of professional conduct, and I made sure to discuss those pitfalls when I was teaching PR last year.

I have also used LinkedIn for several years, mainly for professional purposes to see what others in my profession (at the time compliance and privacy work) were thinking about.  I still belong to a number of LinkedIn…

Recently, I completed reviewing my mid-course student evaluations. 

I have found mid-course evaluations to be quite valuable.  As a student, I remember wishing we had mid-course evaluations so that my comments could be used to improve our class, rather than merely helping the professor improve the course for the next batch of students. 

The mid-course evaluation gives students a chance to voice concerns, anonymously, relatively early in the course.   While professors quickly learn that is likely impossible to please all of their students—some students love the exact same thing that other students hate—trends in mid-course evaluations can alert professors to potential issues and give time to make modifications before the end of the semester.   

Mid-course evaluations can also be used as a teaching tool—modeling the proper way to seek and evaluate advice.  The class period after I administer the mid-course evaluation, I take a few minutes to explain to the class what (if any) changes I plan to make on their advice and why I chose not to follow some of their advice (for example, even if a number of students dislike group work, I explain why we are going to continue with some group exercises).  The students may…

If you practiced as a transactional attorney before law teaching, chances are that you looked at form agreements provided in treatises, saved on your law firm database, handed to you by partners from past deals, or saved in your own template archives.  This is no different from what litigators do either—they look for model existing memos, complaints, document requests, etc. that guide the first draft and let you start somewhere past “zero”.  The rapidly changing legal environment and unique needs of each client in each deal limits the shelf life of form agreements and saddles them with all sort of potential downsides if they aren’t used thoughtfully, verified by research, or tailored to the specific deal.  This disclaimer aside, I am curious about how we teach students about the role of exemplars, and as a starting point, where to find exemplars.  Students and junior attorneys, if not given the right tools to find the best models, will use bad model forms.  If you don’t believe me, see what you get when you search for “standard asset purchase agreement”. 

This raises the question of where should students, attorneys, law professors wanting to incorporate experiential learning exercise modules into their courses look…