Law Students Leave Torts Behind (for a Bit) and Tackle Accounting

Photo
Nicholas Allard, dean of the Brooklyn Law School, with two law students.Credit Jake Naughton for The New York Times

A group of 170 Brooklyn Law School students cut short their winter break and headed back to campus in January for an intensive three-day training session. But not in the law.

Instead, they spent the “boot camp” sessions learning about accounting principles, reading financial statements, valuing assets and other basics of the business world — subjects that not long ago were thought to have no place in classic law school education.

“The boot camp helps you learn more of the nitty-gritty,” said Ricky Liang, 26, a third-year student who attended the workshop. “A lot of students hear phrases like mergers and acquisitions, and it sounds enchanting, but they don’t really know what it is.”

Like Brooklyn Law, more law schools are adding business-oriented offerings to better equip students to compete in a job market that is being reshaped and slimmed down as more routine legal work is being outsourced and corporate budgets cut back. And in the contracting market, students are more focused on trying to land a well-paying job to pay off sizable student loans.

“There’s a broader shift for law schools to prepare students to be more practice-ready when they graduate,” said Brian Z. Tamanaha, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who tracks changes in the legal profession and wrote the book, “Failing Law Schools.”

Law schools as diverse as Brooklyn, Cornell and the University of Maryland are offering focused sessions that aim to bring students up to speed on business practicalities. Like Brooklyn, many are offering brief business-centered workshops, prompted by the lack of exposure many graduates have to teamwork, business strategy, client interaction and other fundamentals of running a corporation.

“Law firms were telling us that associates had no business literacy,” said the dean, Nicholas W. Allard, who arrived at Brooklyn in mid-2012 from the Washington law firm Patton Boggs.

“The need for business literacy has existed for a long time and graduates had to learn the business basics on the wing,” Mr. Allard said, “but the legal recession has forced law schools to address flaws like this that had been papered over, or not addressed, in flush times.”

For the boot camp, Brooklyn Law joined with Deloitte Financial Advisory Services, which had developed a program to give new hires at law firms some business background. The Deloitte team worked with John P. Oswald, chief executive of the investment and merchant bank Capital Trust Group. Mr. Oswald, a Brooklyn Law alumnus and board trustee, has financed the program for three years, helping to shape it for law students.

“The programs law firms offer are very specific, but our program covers a broad diversity of topics, following a business from its inception, through various phases, including franchising and purchasing an overseas business,” said Mr. Oswald, who is also a certified public accountant.

Last year, Cornell University Law School started a similar business-focused workshop, called “Business Concepts for Lawyers.” The idea came from a Harvard Law School survey of employers released in February 2014, said Lynn A. Stout, a professor of corporate and business law at Cornell.

The 124 firms that responded to the survey, called “What Courses Should Law Students Take? Harvard’s Largest Employers Weigh In,” listed accounting, financial statement analysis and corporate finance as the best courses to prepare lawyers to handle corporate and other business matters.

Since nearly 50 percent of Cornell’s graduates end up working at large law firms, Professor Stout organized an intensive weekend program taught by Cornell faculty members.

“You simply can’t be a lawyer at a large firm without grounding in business language and business institutions,” she said. “Clients are less patient about paying large bills for associates who are not prepared to add value to a firm’s legal work.”

Few law schools, however, have taken steps to change their curriculum, in part because first-year courses are seen as indispensable to legal learning and also because some professors typically resist teaching courses that seem vocational. The Francis King Carey School of Law at the University of Maryland is one that has retooled some of its course offerings in recent years and created a business law track for interested students.

An increasing number of students are opting for the business track program, said Michelle M. Harner, the law professor who is director of the program. From two graduates in 2012, there were 15 last year, and as many as 25 graduates are expected this May, she said.

The Baltimore school also offers a boot camp for its students, which is held over three consecutive Friday afternoons in the fall, “providing an opportunity for students to learn to speak the language of their business counterparts,” Professor Harner said.

Students who attend the business workshop also “learn negotiation skills, dealing with case files and other skills,” she said. A team from Deloitte participates in the sessions, which enroll about 90 students each time. Last month, a separate session was also held for first-year students.

“It’s eye-opening for many students who are focusing all their attention on taking courses to get ready to pass the bar exam,” said Brittani N. Gordon, 26, a third-year student at Maryland who attended the workshop last fall. “They know they want to practice law, but they really don’t know what kind. So this is a crash course in areas like tax law and real estate transactions that they haven’t been exposed to.”

The business-directed programs are a response to the new realities of the legal world. In recent years, law schools have seen lower numbers of applications and a drop in job placements. The publication of jobs data, required by the American Bar Association about a year after each graduating class, has highlighted the broad decline in legal hiring across the country.

The Center for the Study of the Legal Profession at Georgetown Law and Thomson Reuters recently issued a report that found law firm hiring was flat, and business spending on legal services rose only slightly over the last decade as corporations moved work from outside law firms to internal legal staffs and more frequently farmed out more routine tasks to nonlaw firms.

Emphasizing delivery of legal services, the University of Colorado Law School last summer began a four-week summer boot camp called “Tech Lawyer Accelerator,” where companies teach the students how to use technology tools to streamline and improve the efficiency of legal work. There were 16 students last summer and each followed the boot camp with a 10-week internship at a technology company to put their newly acquired skills to use.

Still, some legal experts said they were not convinced that only business-specific offerings were an answer in the changing legal market. Professor Tamanaha of Washington University endorsed what could be viewed as a modern twist on the traditional model of “reading the law,” where aspiring lawyers train by working in a licensed lawyer’s practice.

Law schools typically arrange fellowships or externships, many in public service. Increasingly, legal educators are expanding them to include placements in companies. The University of Maryland, for example, will soon announce yearlong fellowships, where a student works and is paid, with Brown Advisory, an investment firm, and the Cordish Companies, a real estate development company, in addition to its summer placements.

“Practice-ready efforts are a strong underlying trend,” Professor Tamanaha said, “But the best answer may take place in externships, where students get practical experience.”