This course presents the fundamentals of business strategy to a legal audience. The class sessions include 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. General counsels from a variety of companies will guest lecture on the role of the GC in the strategy of the company.

The course is designed to introduce a wide variety of modern strategy frameworks and methodologies, including methods for assessing the strength of competition, for understanding
relative bargaining power, for anticipating competitors' actions, for analyzing cost and value structures and their relevance to competition, and for assessing potential changes in the scope of the firm (diversification and vertical integration). Basic mastery of these tools has relevance to everyone seeking a career in business or those advising business managers or executives.

Students enrolled in Business Strategy must (a)have previously taken or be concurrently enrolled in Analytical Methods OR (b) have taken an undergraduate course in economics. Students that currently hold an MBA or enrolled in the JD-MBA program may not take this course. THIS IS A FAST TRACK COURSE.

This course surveys the law providing ground rules for the organization, internal governance, and financing of corporations and other forms of business associations such as partnerships and limited liability companies. Topics include limited liability, fiduciary duties, shareholder voting, derivative suits, control transactions, mergers and acquisitions, public contests, and trading. The emphasis throughout is on the functional analysis of legal rules as one set of constraints on business associations, among others.

A comprehensive introduction to the principal theories of trademark law and unfair competition, copyright law, patent law, and related state and federal doctrines.

Lawyers face non-legal, analytical issues every day. Business lawyers need to understand a business in order to represent their client properly. Litigators need to judge the best route in adopting a litigation strategy. Family lawyers routinely need to value a business. Environmental lawyers need to understand economic externalities. Social lawyers need familiarity with financial instruments that have positive and negative attributes. Students taking this course will find it foundational in running a business, advising a business, or litigating business matters that go beyond the strict letter of the law. In this sense, this is not your standard doctrinal law school course. Rather, it is designed to give students the tools necessary to interact with the business community and run a company or firm. While there is no prerequisite for this course, students should be comfortable with numbers and graphs.

The areas of focus include:

1. Decision Analysis, Games and Information: We will explore a standard technique that has been developed to organize thinking about decision-making problems and to solve them.
2. Accounting: Basic accounting concepts will be introduced, and the relationship between accounting information and economic reality will be examined.
3. Microeconomics: This unit presents basic economic concepts--the operation of competitive markets, imperfect competition, and market failures--that are necessary to this understanding.
4. Statistics: We will address the basic statistical methods, including regression analysis, as well as issues that commonly arise when statistics are used in the courtroom.

The course grade will be made up of (roughly) weekly problem sets, and a final examination.

A study of the federal and state securities laws and the industry they govern with emphasis on the regulation of the distribution process and trading in securities; subjects dealt with include the functions of the Securities and Exchange Commission, registration and disclosure requirements and related civil liabilities, "blue-sky" laws, proxy solicitation and reporting requirements, broker-dealer regulation, the self-regulatory functions of the exchanges, and the regulation of investment companies.

This perspectives course serves as an anchor for the E-LLM program. In addition to giving students a theoretical framework through which to understand the relationship of entrepreneurship and law, the course will feature regular opportunities to learn directly from entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial lawyers.