If the law is a business, should law school be more like business school? This New
York Law Journal article provides
the full spectrum of perspectives on that question, making it either
journalistically professional and even-handed or else a complete hodgepodge
(guess where I come out?).
The article’s key analytic failing is confusing and conflating "what
a lawyer needs to know about business in order to run his firm"
with "what a lawyer needs to know about business to advise his client
astutely and strategically." They have always been two different
things, and from the perspective of what it takes for true success in
practice, the second has always been absolutely indispensable and the
first best left to others.
Having graduated from Stanford Law School and having earned 98% of an
MBA at night at NYU’s Stern School of Business, I can testify that law
school is far more rigorous and intellectually demanding—something
of a graduate degree in raw thinking, vs. the business school’s emphasis
on cultivating teamwork, and throwing in a dose of falsely precise
financial-analysis tools and breathtakingly common-sense wisdom-bites. (For
example, in marketing: "Make it easy for your customer to do business
with you.")
Yet the most intriguing question of all goes completely unaddressed
in the article: Is there something intrinsic to "thinking like
a lawyer" that disables a true gift for business? While it’s
true that Harvard Law School ranks third among professional schools (including MBA programs) in the number
of alumni serving as Fortune 500 CEOs, that is scarcely a representative
sample: These people are outliers if anyone is. And would
any of them be accused of "thinking like a lawyer?"
