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

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 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

Professor Nanda is the Faculty Chair of the program, Research Director, Center on Lawyers and the Professional Services Industry, and Robert Baucher Professor of Practice at Harvard Law School. Before joining the Law School, Nanda was a Harvard Business School faculty member for 13 years. He taught "Professional Services" in the MBA program and the HBS executive education program "Leading Professional Service Firms." A recipient the Henry B. Arthur Fellowship and the Center in Ethics and the Professions Fellowship, he has published several case studies and Harvard Business Review articles and is a coauthor (with Tom DeLong) of Professional Services: Cases & Text.
Nanda has advised law, accounting, investment banking, management consulting, advertising, and executive search firms as well as diversified, international corporations. His law clients include global law firms, AmLaw 20 law firms, Magic Circle firms, focused firms, regional firms, international law firms outside the U.S. and U.K., and corporate counsel offices of global financial and pharmaceutical organizations. His work with these organizations has spanned strategic planning, review of specific organizational practices and systems, leadership programs, and personal coaching. Before coming to Harvard, he was an executive with the Tata group of companies in India.

David Wilkins

Professor Wilkins is the Kirkland & Ellis 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, the program will benefits from the insights of visiting faculty, Dan DiPietro and Ben Heineman.

Dan DiPietro

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

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.