The Teaching Team

The core teaching team are members of the Harvard Law School faculty - distinguished academicians, educators, researchers, authors, and practitioners in their respective fields. Representing various disciplines, they are close to practice through relationships with law firm leaders and through personal involvement as consultants for top firms around the world. Short biographical sketches follow.

John Coates IV
Leadership in Law Firms
Leadership in Corporate Counsel

Professor Coates, John F. Cogan, Jr. Professor of Law and Economics, joined the faculty in 1997 after private practice at the New York law firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, where he was a partner specializing in mergers and acquisitions, corporate and securities law, and the regulation of financial institutions. He teaches courses on Mergers & Acquisitions, Financial Institutions Regulation, Contracts, Corporations, and the History of Capitalist Institutions. Before coming to HLS, he taught on the adjunct faculties of New York University School of Law and Boston University School of Law.

He is a frequent panelist and speaker on M&A, and a consultant to the SEC, law firms, mutual funds, hedge funds, and other participants in the M&A and capital markets. He is a member of the Legal Advisory Committee of the New York Stock Exchange and is a past director of the American Law and Economics Association. He is the author of numerous articles on corporate, securities, and financial institution law, and for seven years co-authored the leading annual survey of developments in financial institution M&A. His current research at Harvard includes empirical studies of the causes and consequences of the completion or failure of M&A transactions, including management buyouts, and of the effects of CEO tenure and option compensation on M&A in the 1990s.

Ashish Nanda, Program Chair
Leadership in Law Firms
Leadership in Corporate Counsel
Emerging Leaders in Law Firms: New Partner Program
Milbank@Harvard

Ashish Nanda is Robert Braucher Professor of Practice at Harvard Law School. He teaches “Leadership in Law Firms” and “Professional Services: Advanced Topics” in the JD program, is faculty director of Executive Education, and is research director at the Program on the Legal Profession. Before joining Harvard Law School, Nanda was a Harvard Business School faculty member for 13 years, where he continues to teach in executive education courses.

Nanda has a PhD in business economics (Harvard), AM in Economics (Harvard), PGDM in management (IIM Ahmedabad), and B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering (IIT Delhi). Before coming to Harvard for his PhD, he worked for five years with the Tata group of companies as Tata Administrative Services officer.

A recipient of the Henry B. Arthur Fellowship, the Center in Ethics and the Professions Fellowship, President of India Gold Medal (twice), and the IIM Director’s Gold Medal, he has published several case studies and Harvard Business Review articles and is a coauthor (with Tom DeLong) of Professional Services: Cases & Text. His research, in the form of conceptual articles, case studies, surveys, and large sample empirical analyses, focuses on professional services. It encompasses three streams – professionalism, professionals’ labor market, and management of professional service organizations.

Nanda has advised law firms and inside counsel in companies as well as other professional service organizations including accounting, advertising, asset management, engineering consulting, executive search, human resource consulting, investment banking, IT consulting, management consulting, public relations, and real estate firms. His work with these firms has spanned (a) strategic planning, including designing and executing strategic planning process and reviewing alliance strategies and options; (b) developing organizational strategy, including organizational structure design and review of communication processes; (c) reviewing governance systems, including independent analysis of executive and oversight bodies and succession planning; (d) analyzing people practices, including compensation systems, recruitment and retention practices at partner and associate level; and (e) designing and delivering leadership programs

Guhan Subramanian
Emerging Leaders in Law Firms: New Partner Program
Leadership in Corporate Counsel
Milbank@Harvard

Professor Subramanian is the Joseph Flom Professor of Law and Business at the Harvard Law School and the Douglas Weaver Professor of Business Law at the Harvard Business School.  He is the only person in the history of Harvard University to hold tenured appointments at both HLS and HBS.  At HLS he teaches courses in negotiations and corporate law.  At HBS he teaches in several executive education programs, such as Strategic Negotiations, Changing the Game, the Global Negotiator, and Making Corporate Boards More Effective.   He is also the course head for the first-year course on Negotiations, taught to 900 MBA students each year.  He is the faculty chair for the JD/MBA program at Harvard University and the faculty director for the Corporate Dealmaking project at the Harvard Program on Negotiation.  Prior to joining the Harvard faculty he spent three years at McKinsey & Company in their New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C. offices. 

Professor Subramanian holds an A.B. in Economics from Harvard College; an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School; and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. His research explores topics in negotiations, corporate dealmaking, and corporate governance. His new book Negotiauctions: New Dealmaking Strategies for a Competitive Marketplace (Norton 2009) synthesizes the findings from his research and teaching over the past decade.

Professor Subramanian has been involved in major public-company deals such as Oracle’s $10.3 billion hostile takeover bid for PeopleSoft, Cox Enterprises’ $8.9 billion freeze-out of the minority shareholders in Cox Communications, and the $6.6 billion leveraged buyout of Toys “R” Us.  He also advises individuals, boards of directors, and management teams on issues of dealmaking and corporate governance.

George G. Triantis
Emerging Leaders in Law Firms: New Partner Program

George Triantis is a Professor of Law at Stanford University and an affiliated faculty of the Stanford’s Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance.  Prior to joining the Standford Law faculty in 2011, he was the Eli Goldston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and formerly held the chairs of Seymour Logan Professor at the University of Chicago and Perre Bowen Professor at the University of Virginia. 

Triantis began his academic career in 1989 on the faculties of Law and of Management at the University of Toronto.  His teaching and scholarship are in the fields of contracts, business law and bankruptcy.  His recent work includes “Strategic Vagueness in Contracts: The Case of Corporate Acquisitions” (Yale Law Journal, 2010) and “Completing Contracts in the Shadow of Verification Costs” (Journal of Legal Studies 2008), as well the book, “Foundations of Commercial Law” (Foundation Press, 2010).  He is a former editor of the Journal of Law & Economics and a former director of the American Law and Economics Association. 

Triantis is currently Vice-Chair of the Avoiding Powers subcommittee of the ABA Business Bankruptcy Committee, and a member of the American Law Institute and the American Law and Economics Association.

David Wilkins
Leadership in Law Firms
Leadership in Corporate Counsel
Emerging Leaders in Law Firms: New Partner Program
Milbank@Harvard

Professor Wilkins is the Lester Kissel Professor of Law and Director of the Program on the Legal Profession and Director of the Center on Lawyers and the Professional Services Industry at Harvard Law School. He is also a Visiting Senior Research Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and a Faculty Associate of the Harvard University Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics.
Professor Wilkins has written over 50 articles on the legal profession in leading scholarly journals and the popular press and is the co-author (along with his Harvard Law School colleague Andrew Kaufman) of one of the leading casebooks in the field. His current scholarly projects on the profession include After the JD, a ten-year nationwide longitudinal study of lawyers' careers, a quantitative and qualitative examination of how corporations purchase legal services, an empirical project on the development of "ethical infrastructure" in large law firms based on a series of focus groups with leading practitioners and regulators, and over 200 in-depth interviews in connection with a forthcoming Oxford University Press book on the development of the black corporate bar.

Professor Wilkins also teaches several courses on lawyers and other related professionals, including the country's only four credit course on the Legal Profession, a course entitled "Professional Service Firms in the Twenty First Century," seminars on The Future of the Large Law Firm and Cause Lawyers, and an introductory lecture for all first year students on the legal profession and careers. Professor Wilkins is a frequent speaker at academic conferences, law firms, corporate counsel retreats, and other professional service organizations, and bar groups both in the United States and around the world. He is also a member of Harvard University's Task Force on Professional Schools.

In addition, Executive Education programs will benefit from the insights of visiting faculty Dan DiPietro, and Ben Heineman.

Dan DiPietro
Leadership in Law Firms

Mr. DiPietro has been a student of the legal industry for over 25 years. As client head of the Law Firm Group at the Citigroup Private Bank, he regularly meets with law firm leaders to present financial analysis of their firms' performance vs. a group of peer firms. Dan speaks at industry roundtables and partner retreats and has been published in a number of legal industry periodicals including frequent contributions to the American Lawyer.

The Law Firm Group's 200 professionals provide financial advice and services to more than 35,000 attorneys and over 550 law firms in 10 offices in the US and London. The Law Firm Group lends to over 200 law firms in the US & UK, including almost 60 of the Am Law 100, and currently has $6 billion in loans to law firms and their attorneys.

Prior to joining Citigroup in 1987, DiPietro spent five years managing Mellon Bank's middle market lending office in New York. Previously, he was a banker within Chase Manhattan Bank’s middle market lending division. He also managed a not-for-profit organization and taught in the NYC school system.

DiPietro holds an MBA from Columbia University and a BA from St. John's University. He resides in Sea Cliff, NY with his wife Ann (35 years). He is the father of three and grandfather of one. Aside from his "day job," he teaches yoga.

Ben Heineman
Leadership in Corporate Counsel

Mr. Heineman is a distinguished senior fellow of the Program on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School and senior fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government.

A graduate of Harvard College (1965), Oxford University (1967 -- graduate degree/political science) and Yale Law School (1971), former Rhodes Scholar, editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal and law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, Mr. Heineman practiced law in Washington before serving at HEW from 1977-1980, ending his tenure there as Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. He was then managing partner of the Washington office of Sidley & Austin, focusing on Supreme Court and test case litigation.

In 1987, Mr. Heineman became Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary of the General Electric Company located in Fairfield, Connecticut. In 2004, he was named GE's Senior Vice President for Law and Public Affairs.

Mr. Heineman is a member of the American Law Institute; a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; a member of the Board of Trustees of the Center for Strategic and International Studies; a member of the Board of Transparency International-USA; a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Constitution Center; and a member of the Board of Managers and Overseers of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He is the author of books on British race relations and the American presidency.