The Teaching Team

The core teaching team are members of the Harvard Law School, and Harvard Business 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.

Vikramaditya Khanna

Vikramaditya Khanna is co-director of the Joint Centre for Global Corporate and Financial Law & Policy, a collaboration between Michigan Law and India's Jindal Global Law School. He earned his SJD at Harvard Law School, where he has been a visiting faculty member. He served as a senior research fellow at Columbia Law School and Yale Law School, and as a visiting scholar at Stanford Law School. He was a recipient of the John M. Olin Faculty Fellowship in 2002–2003. His interest areas include corporate and securities law, corporate crime, law in India, corporate governance in emerging markets, and law and economics. He is the founding and current editor of both the India Law Abstracts and the White Collar Crime Abstracts on the Social Science Research Network and is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He has testified before the U.S. Congress and his papers have been published in the Harvard Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the Supreme Court Economic Review, the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, and the Georgetown Law Journal. News publications in the United States, India, Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom have quoted him. He has given talks at Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, and Yale universities; the University of California, Berkeley; and the Wharton School, as well as to the National Bureau of Economic Research and the American Law and Economics Association. He has presented in the United States, India, China, Turkey, Brazil, and Greece.

Ashish Nanda, Program Chair

Ashish Nanda is the Robert Braucher Professor of Practice at Harvard Law School. He teaches “Leadership in Law Firms” and “Professional Services: Advanced Topics” in the J.D. 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 executive education courses.

Nanda has a Ph.D. in business economics (Harvard), A.M. in Economics (Harvard), PGDM in management (IIM Ahmedabad), and B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering (IIT Delhi). Before coming to Harvard for his Ph.D., 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, actuarial benefits consulting, advertising, asset management, engineering consulting, executive search, human resource consulting, investment banking, IT consulting, management consulting, public relations, strategy consulting, 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.

David Wilkins

David Wilkins is the Lester Kissel Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Global Initiatives on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School. He is also the Faculty Director of the School’s Program on the Legal Profession and Center on Lawyers and the Professional Services Industry, as well as, 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.

Wilkins has written over 60 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 case books in the field. His current scholarly projects on the profession include After the J.D., 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.

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 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.