Our Offerings

Data Analytics for Lawyers

Analytics refers to the ways in which enterprises can use data to gain insights and make better decisions. In this offering, Summer Associates will be introduced to the fundamental concepts of data analytics, focusing on the insights and applications of the techniques rather than their derivation or implementation. Participants will understand the intersection of law and data analytics in topics such as social justice, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and privacy. By the end of the course, students should be comfortable with the core ideas behind data analytics and its potential for application during their summer internship and beyond.

Financial Statement Analysis

This offering concentrates on how various financial reporting options affect income, assets, cash flow forecasts, financial ratios, and trends. Distinguishing between accounting rules and underlying economic realities is emphasized throughout. Participants will learn how financial statements are prepared, the linkage between the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement, and how these statements need to be examined as a whole to understand a company's performance. 

Regulating Big Tech

Europe has been at the forefront of regulating the digital economy, leveraging its antitrust laws against big tech companies such as Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. The EU is also the world’s leading regulator of data privacy through its GDPR that has become a global benchmark for the companies worldwide. The EU’s latest regulatory proposals—Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act—are the next regulatory frontier that will shape the technology industry in the EU, US and beyond. This course will introduce the participants to the EU’s key regulations affecting the Big Tech industry, explaining the key legal instruments, enforcement actions, and the broader regulatory philosophy underlying the EU’s regulatory agenda. This offering can be structured as a single 1-hour introductory course or broken into 2-3 individual classes that will delve deeper into sub-topics such as privacy, online speech, antitrust, or comparative analysis of the EU, US and Chinese regulation of digital economy.

Valuation

This course provides an overview of the intersection between the fields of financial valuation and law—one that has grown increasingly prominent within a variety of contexts including: contracts, mergers and acquisitions, securities litigation, regulated industries, corporate law, antitrust and intellectual property. Emphasis will center on developing an understanding for the techniques that financial professionals have developed over the last half century to address "real world" problems of valuation as they come up in legal settings (both litigation and transactional).

Venture Capital

Using venture capital as a case study, this course highlights two key ways that transactional lawyers add value. First, although transactions vary in their details, every deal involves problems of information and incentives, which can discourage parties from entering into what otherwise would be value-maximizing arrangements. Second, legal and regulatory regimes sometimes treat economically similar arrangements differently. The best deal lawyers find ways to overcome these information and incentive problems and navigate these regulatory regimes and enable participants to explore different responses to the relevant issues, including VC specialization, staged financing, VC control rights, the impact of an IPO on these rights, the VC’s reputation among entrepreneurs and investors, equity compensation, the VC’s carry, clawbacks, the mandatory liquidation of VC funds, and the tax implications of providing convertible preferred stock to VCs and common stock to entrepreneurs.

Authentic, Strategic Relationship Cultivation

Participants will learn and practice interpersonal tactics for developing a robust, sustainable, authentic, and mutually beneficial array of internal and external relationships, and learn how to build peer leadership, followership, and goodwill in one’s network. This workshop can include one additional hour of individual coaching for participants as desired.  
 

Building Your Resilience

During this session, we will explore the challenges of working in a more complex legal context and the impact this has on us. We will examine how stress affects us and how we can improve our capacity to cope with the demands of our environment. Building on these foundations, we will then reflect on the longer-term—what can you do to ensure that you spend your time on your key priorities, both professionally and personally. We will end by focusing on concrete steps that we can take to ensure that this session has practical relevance for each participant.

Cultivating Racial Literacy

This workshop will help participants identify the individual and organizational skills and practices required to engage effectively with people of different races and identities in the legal workplace. It will tailor the practice of racial literacy to the specific contexts that the workshop participants inhabit and the identities that workshop participants hold. It will focus attention on developing the capacity to navigate racially stressful situations, as well as to situate interactions in the larger historical and structural landscape so that participants can decode and make legible the impact of race on success and thriving.

Presence!  Developing Gravitas and Communicating Authentically Virtually and in-Person

Regardless of personality type, participants will learn the strategies for developing presence and gravitas by focusing on, among other things, mindset, preparation, virtual and in-person body language, vocal tone and pace, and brevity and crispness of the spoken word. Participants will also learn techniques for “thinking on their feet” including, how to respond effectively when uncertain; how to field curveball questions adroitly and how to leverage spontaneity. This workshop will help participants build confidence as communicators, advocates and service providers, whether they communicate virtually or in-person. This workshop includes one hour of additional individual coaching for participants.

The Workforce of the Future

Gen Z is the first majority-minority generation and will be the largest generation in US history. Current first-year law students are nearly 90% Gen-Z. This offering will help lawyers and firm personnel understand what makes law firms attractive to Gen Zs, particularly Gen Zs who are first generation and people of color. It will share insights about elements of the work experience - physical work spaces, work arrangements, feedback mechanisms, mentorship, sponsorship, client relationships, etc. - that are most important to future Gen Z lawyers. 

Legal Pathways to Deep Decarbonization in the United States by Michael Gerrard

Legal Pathways provides a “legal playbook” for deep decarbonization in the United States, identifying well over 1,000 legal options for enabling the United States to address one of the greatest problems facing this country and the rest of humanity.  The legal options involve federal, state, and local law, as well as private governance.  While both the scale and complexity of deep decarbonization are enormous, this book has a simple message: deep decarbonization is achievable in the United States using laws that exist or could be enacted. And these legal tools can be used with significant economic, social, environmental, and national security benefits.

Mine! How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives by Michael Heller

When is it okay to recline your airplane seat? Why does HBO want you to share your password illegally? What do you really own when you click the “buy now” button? And why can’t you sell your spare kidney? In the spirited style of Freakonomics, Nudge, and Tipping Point, Michael Heller will explore fun, surprising, and often infuriating real-life stories that reveal who gets what in the 21st century. Remarkably, there are just a handful of simple stories that everyone uses to claim everything. These are the stories kids use to solve fights on the playground – and they offer our best chance to address really big problems like preserving online freedom, cooling our warming planet, and curbing America’s new wealth aristocracy. Ownership shapes every single day of our lives. Every minute! Savvy owners choose the story that steers us to do what they want. But don’t be fooled. Ownership is always up for grabs and the prize goes to those who know how its hidden rules really work.  Firms will have the option to purchase copies of the book for Summer Associates.

The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World by Anu Bradford

The Brussels Effect challenges the prevalent view that the European Union is a declining world power. It argues that notwithstanding its many obvious challenges, the EU remains an influential superpower that shapes the world in its image through a phenomenon called the “Brussels Effect.” Without the need to resort to international institutions or seek other nations’ cooperation, the EU has the unique ability among nations today to promulgate regulations that shape the global business environment, elevating standards worldwide and leading to a notable Europeanization of many important aspects of global commerce. In this way, the EU wields significant, unique, and highly penetrating power to unilaterally transform global markets, including through its ability to set the standards in diverse areas such as antitrust regulation, data protection, online hate speech, consumer health and safety, or environmental protection. The Brussels Effect was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by Foreign Affairs.

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality by Katharina Pistor

What is it that transforms a simple object, an idea, or a promise to pay into an asset that creates wealth? Katharina Pistor explains how, behind closed doors in the offices of private attorneys, capital is created—and why this little-known activity is one of the biggest reasons for the widening wealth gap between the holders of capital and everybody else. A powerful new way of thinking about one of the most pernicious problems of our time, The Code of Capital explores the various ways that debt, complex financial products, and other assets are selectively coded to protect and reproduce private wealth. This provocative book paints a troubling portrait of the pervasive global nature of the code, the people who shape it, and the governments that enforce it.