Global Law and Business Seminar

The Global Law and Business Seminar offers 16 hours of academic content focused on three subjects, each designed to be accessible to both corporate managers and business lawyers: Corporate Decision-Making and the Law of the New Global Economy; Deals: The Law and Economics of Transactions; and Get the Deal Done: Cross-Border M&A for Global Executives and Lawyers. Participants in this non-credit program choose one of these subjects and receive an official Statement of Participation from Columbia Law School upon completion.

The program is designed for global business lawyers, corporate managers, and other business leaders, with modules taught by a mix of preeminent scholars and deeply experienced practitioners who are affiliated with Columbia Law School and other world-renowned institutions.

A first university degree in a related discipline is generally required. In recent years the average age of participants was approximately 32.

Key Points

Note: Columbia Law School also hosts the US Business Law Academy (USBLA), a separate three-week summer program comprised of four modules focused on US business law.  The USBLA is intended for law students and legal practitioners, and offers 48 hours of academic instruction on US legal institutions, negotiation, corporate governance, and transactions.

Corporate Decision-Making and the Law of the New Global Economy (Prof. Geneviève Helleringer)  

This short course equips participants with the tools to navigate high-stakes corporate decisions in an era of legal diversity, regulatory flux, and (decreasing) economic interdependence. From boardrooms to cross-border negotiations, today’s leaders must operate at the intersection of law, economics, and behavioral science.

We begin by examining how global contractual practices, and the architecture of international financial markets, shape corporate strategy. Participants will explore both emerging issues—such as geo-economic tensions, cybersecurity, and sustainability—and enduring governance challenges like conflicts of interest and stakeholder alignment. Case studies including Siemens, Volkswagen, Boeing, Exxon, and Marriott will illustrate how corporate purpose, responsibility, and externalities influence decision-making at the highest level.

The second half of the course focuses on structuring, negotiating, and enforcing agreements across borders under conditions of imperfect information, cultural difference, and legal diversity. Participants will practice integrative and distributive negotiation strategies, learn to design contracts that align incentives and allocate risk, and study high-profile disputes such as the Dow-Haas merger. The program concludes with an exploration of international dispute resolution—arbitration and mediation—through a final, high-stakes role-play.

Delivered through a mix of short lectures (with a touch of Socratic method), small-group case preparation and plenary debriefs, and immersive simulations, the course emphasizes practical, principle-based decision-making from a truly international perspective. Examples are drawn from multiple jurisdictions, but the focus remains on the core strategic insights that apply across borders.
 

Deals: The Law and Economics of Transactions (Dean Emeritus Schizer)

This short course explores two types of issues that commonly arise in sophisticated transactions. First, although transactions vary in their details, every transaction involves problems of information and incentives that can discourage parties from entering into what otherwise would be value-maximizing arrangements.  For example, the seller of an asset almost always has better information about it than the buyer does.  This reality — combined with the fact that the seller is willing to sell — can cause buyers to be skeptical about the asset’s quality, and might even persuade them not to purchase it.  A central responsibility of transactional lawyers, then, is to help overcome these information and incentive problems.  They do so with a range of contractual and organizational responses, such as due diligence, contingent purchase price, staged financing, vouching by third parties, etc.

Second, legal and regulatory regimes sometimes are imperfectly drafted and conceptualized, so that economically similar arrangements are treated differently. These differences create possibilities for legal arbitrage, so that a change in the way the transaction is structured can yield dramatically better (or worse) treatment for the parties.  More generally, sophisticated transactional lawyers must help their clients navigate regulatory hurdles, and the nature of the relevant regulations -- and the parties’ responses to them –- can determine whether a potentially promising business succeeds or fails.

This course develop these two themes (information and incentive problems and regulatory arbitrage) in various settings, including acquisitions, venture capital, derivative securities, and energy.  For example, we will consider various mechanisms to bridge information problems in acquisitions, and will use venture capital funds and their market practices as examples of contractual and organizational mechanisms that deal with incentive issues.  As examples of regulatory arbitrage, we will explore selected examples involving U.S. tax rules and energy policy.  These various examples will expose students to a survey of selected cutting edge issues in a sophisticated transactional practice.  Students will be invited to reflect on the extent to which lawyers are adding value (or not) for their clients and for society.

Get the Deal Done! Cross-Border M&A for Global Executives and Lawyers (Prof. Maria Luisa Cánovas)

This short course is specifically designed for global corporate managers and other business-oriented professionals, but international business lawyers are welcome to attend as well.

It offers a practical introduction to the key issues that come into play in NY law-based cross-border deals. The material is approached from the perspective of a non-U.S. business executive who wishes to understand the dynamics of doing deals in the U.S., with U.S. counterparts, or simply under NY law.  (The majority of major cross-border M&A transactions are based on NY law, regardless of the actual origin of the parties.)

We will begin with an overview of the deal cycle and discuss the main themes that come-up in international transactions, such as how to integrate political and regulatory considerations in the deal terms and how to balance risk.  We will then turn to discussing the main financing options on private M&A transactions and the growing importance of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) criteria to the investment community and its impact on deal making. During our last session, we will conduct a hands-on negotiation workshop based on a real-world matter:  the break-up of a joint venture spanning multiple countries in Latin America.

Each of the four sessions will focus on a hands-on approach to doing business and some of the sessions may include a 30-minute interview with an experienced executive on the topic we will be discussing that day. See information about this year's guest speakers below.

Guest speakers for 2026 have not yet been determined, but past speakers have included: 

• Vanessa Dager, BNP Paribas, Head of Advisory North America: BNP Paribas is a multinational universal bank and financial services holding company that supports corporate and institutional clients in their transformation and development projects.

• Brett Barragate, Jones Day, chair of the Americas, Financial Markets Practice: With 40 offices on five continents, Jones Day is a global law firm working on legal matters impacting the modern national or multinational corporation.

  
   

María Luisa Cánovas
(Canovas Law PLLC)

A partner in top U.S. law firms for nearly twenty years, Maria Luisa Cánovas has been ranked for more than a decade as a leading New York lawyer for M&A in Latin America by, among others, Chambers Latin America (2024), Chambers Global (2024), The Legal 500 Latin America (2022) and Latinvex “Top 50 Female Lawyers in Latin America.”  Spain’s Expansion Juridica recently listed her as one of the top Spanish lawyers practicing in the United States.  In addition, the acquisition by Grupo Hame of the agrobusiness of Agrokasa (Peru), in which Maria Luisa represented Grupo Hame as NY M&A counsel, was shortlisted for the 2024 Latin Lawyer’s and IFLR Americas Deal of the Year Awards in the category of M&A.

Over the course of her career, Professor Cánovas has worked extensively with public companies such as Sanofi, PepsiCo and News Corporation; private equity funds such as Macquarie, Hicks Muse and Playa Hotels & Resorts; and Latin-American based companies such as Betesh International and Cabcorp.  Since launching a boutique practice in 2022, Professor Cánovas has continued to work for long-standing clients and taught several M&A courses at Columbia Law School. She has also held visiting posts at various other academic institutions including Strathmore University (Kenya) and Universidad Panamericana (Mexico).

In addition to advising corporate clients and world-wide teaching assignments, Professor Cánovas has  been dedicated to pro-bono service and diversity-related matters throughout her career. She is a member of the Board of the Queen Sophia Institute, the US-Mexico Bar Association, and the Finance Committee of the Brooklyn Public Library.
 

Genevieve Helleringer
(Oxford University and ESSEC Business School)

Genevieve Helleringer is a law professor at Oxford Law Faculty and ESSEC Business School, a Research Member and vice-chair of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) and a member of the American Law Institute and of Prime Finance.

Her research focuses on comparative contract, corporate and financial law, as well as commercial dispute resolution. It draws on insights from psychology, as well as economics, and sociology. Genevieve  is an academic editor of the Oxford Business Law Blog, and a founding and executive editor of the Journal of Financial Regulation (OUP). She has been a visiting professor at UCLA and Paris Pantheon Assas, and a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute in Hamburg.

Genevieve holds a JD from Columbia University (1999), an MSc in legal sociology from Paris Panthéon Assas University (2009), as well as an MSc and a doctorate in private law from the Sorbonne University (2010) (receiving four national prizes for her doctoral thesis). She is admitted to the New York and the Paris Bars and a qualified mediator. She studied philosophy, mathematics and literature, as an undergraduate, and economics and social sciences later at Essec Business School and Sciences-Po Paris, as well as experimental psychology at graduate level at Oxford University. Before completing her doctoral work, she worked for Shiseido in Japan and practised private equity and capital market law at Willkie Farr & Gallagher and at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in New York and Paris (2000-2006).

Genevieve was the mediator for the French Retail Market Association (2017-2020). She was appointed in 2021 by the European Banking Authority on the Board of Appel of the European Financial Supervisory Authorities. Her research has been cited by courts, policy documents and news organisation in France, United Kingdom and the US. Genevieve has appeared as an expert witness before various jurisdictions. 
In her spare time, Genevieve plays the piano and writes short stories.
 

David M. Schizer
(Columbia Law School)

David M. Schizer is Dean Emeritus and Harvey R. Miller Professor of Law & Economics. He served from 2004 to 2014 as the youngest dean in the history of Columbia Law School.  One of the nation's leading tax scholars, his research also focuses on nonprofits, energy law, and corporate governance. He is the author of How to Save the World in Six (Not So Easy) Steps: Bringing Out the Best in Nonprofits. 

Schizer is a founder and co-director of the Richard Paul Richman Center for Business, Law, and Public Policy, a founder and co-chair of the Center for Israeli Legal Studies, and a founder and co-chair of the Charles Evans Gerber Transactional Studies Center. 

Schizer has won the Willis L.M. Reese Prize for Excellence in Teaching and has served as a visiting professor at Yale, Harvard, Georgetown, Tokyo University, Hebrew University, the Interdisciplinary Center in Herziliya, and Ono Academic College.

General Information about the Global Law and Business Seminar

Click to Open Location and Housing

The Global Law and Business Seminar is presented in-person on the iconic campus of Columbia University in the City of New York. 

We recommend that participants consider staying in a local hotel, AirBnB, or similar accommodation.  (A list of hotels used by past Columbia visitors can be found here.) 

Limited housing is also available in Watt Hall or similar on-campus student undergraduate dormitories. Dormitory rooms, when available, are much more reasonably priced than hotels or commercially-available accommodation. Student residence halls are very simply furnished with an air conditioner, desk, bed, and linens.  They lack some of the amenities (e.g., televisions, coffee makers, etc.) found elsewhere.  All on-campus accommodations have private bedrooms, but some may share bathrooms with 1-4 other program participants who have their own private bedrooms in the same suite or on the same floor.

 

Program Fee:  The overall fee for the program is $2,600 with housing or $2,100 without housing.

Discounts:

• Alumni Discounted Fee:  $1,350.  Former participants in Columbia Law School programs, and those who are referred by them.  Must apply by November 15.
   
• Partner Discounted Fee:  $1,600.  Individual affiliates (e.g., current students, graduates, employees) of Columbia Law School partner organizations.  Must apply by December 15.
   
• Early Bird Discounted Fee:  $1,850.  Must apply by January 15.
   
• Special Pricing Arrangements. Some organizations have made special pricing arrangements with Columbia Law School.  For further information, please email [email protected].

Deposit:  All participants are asked to pay a non-refundable deposit of $1,000 (if requesting on-campus accommodation) or $500 (if not requesting on-campus accommodation), within two weeks of being invited to join the program.

Balance.  The balance of the program fee will then be due on May 1.

This deposit will be credited towards the overall program fee. Program fees cover the costs of the academic program and materials, non-academic programming, networking opportunities, and (as applicable) single-occupancy housing in Columbia University student residence halls.