Kathryn E. Spier
Courses
Business Strategy for Lawyers
Business Strategy for Lawyers presents the fundamentals of business strategy to a legal audience. The class sessions include both traditional lectures and business-school case discussions. The lecture topics and analytical frameworks are drawn from MBA curriculums at leading business schools. The cases are selected for both their business strategy content and their legal interest.
The main course material is divided into four parts. The first part presents the basic frameworks for the analysis of strategy. The topics include economic and game theoretic approaches to strategy, competitive advantage and industry analysis. The second part is concerned with organizational and contractual responses to agency problems. Topics include pay-for-performance, corporate control, and the design of partnerships and other business associations. The third part takes a broader view of business associations, considering the horizontal and vertical scope of the firm and the advantages of hybrid organizational forms such as franchising and joint ventures. The fourth part covers special topics in competitive strategy, including product differentiation, tacit collusion, facilitating practices, network externalities, market foreclosure, and innovation.
This course is well-suited for students interested in economic analysis of the law with a strong business and industry focus. Because of the significant overlap with the MBA curriculum, this class is not appropriate for students in the JD-MBA program. Since the lectures and assignments focus on abstract frameworks and theoretic approaches, a basic familiarity with economic reasoning and simple algebra is assumed.
Analytical Methods
Lawyers in almost every area of practice (litigation, corporate, government, public interest) deal routinely with problems that are usefully illuminated by basic business and economic concepts. Analytical Methods is designed to teach the most important analytical methods to law students, in a manner that will be fully accessible to those with no prior quantitative training or background in the subjects covered. Using text, classroom activities, and written exercises, we will explore how these tools may be used to analyze concrete problems that arise in a wide range of legal practice settings. The course will consist of seven units:
1. Decision Analysis, Games and Information: Lawyers assist their clients in making a wide variety of decisions, ranging from the settlement of lawsuits to the purchase of property. We will explore a standard technique that has been developed to organize thinking about decision-making problems and to solve them. We will also consider strategic interactions between parties and considerations related to imperfect information.
2. Contracting: Lawyers write many contracts, concerning such matters as acquisitions of land or corporations, creation of partnerships and nonprofit entities, settlement of lawsuits, financing arrangements, and government procurement. This unit presents practical principles concerning what issues should be addressed in contracts and how they might best be resolved.
3. Accounting: Lawyers who counsel clients in conducting their affairs or who represent them in litigation must understand the parties' financial circumstances and dealings, which often are represented in financial statements. Basic accounting concepts will be introduced, and the relationship between accounting information and economic reality will be examined.
4. Finance: Legal advice in business transactions, division of assets upon divorce, litigation, and many other matters require knowledge of valuation, assessment of financial risk, and comprehension of the relationships between those who provide financing and those who need it. We will consider basic principles of finance, such as present value, the tradeoff between risk and return, the importance of diversification, and basic methods for valuing financial assets.
5. Microeconomics: Lawyers need to understand their clients' and other parties' economic situations and opportunities as well as the principles that underlie many of the rules of our legal system. This unit presents basic economic concepts--the operation of competitive markets, imperfect competition, and market failures--that are necessary to this understanding.
6. Law and Economics: Legal rules have important effects on clients' interests, which must be appreciated by lawyers who advise them and by judges, regulators, and legislators who formulate legal rules. We will explore these effects using the economic approach to law, with illustrations from torts, contracts, property, law enforcement, and legal procedure.
7. Statistics: Legal matters increasingly involve the use of statistics in business contexts, in the promulgation of government regulations, in the measurement of damages, in attempts to make inferences concerning parties' behavior (such as those regarding discrimination in employment), and in determination of causation (in tort, contract, and other disputes). We will address the basic statistical methods, including regression analysis, as well as issues that commonly arise when statistics are used in the courtroom.
Law, Economics and Organization Seminar
This seminar will involve the presentation by speakers of papers in the fields of law and economics, law and finance, and contract theory. Students may satisfy the course requirement either by submitting, before sessions, short written comments on the paper to be presented or by writing a short seminar paper on an approved topic.