Our core teaching team are members of the Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School faculty–distinguished academicians, educators, researchers, authors, and practitioners in their respective fields. Representing various disciplines, they are close to practice through relationships with law firm leaders and through personal involvement as consultants for top firms around the world.
Scott Westfahl is the Faculty Director of HLS Executive Education and also teaches courses on problem solving, teams, networks and innovation within the law school’s J.D. curriculum. As the Faculty Director of the Executive Education program, he leads the HLS effort to support and develop lawyers across the arc of their careers, particularly as they advance to new levels of leadership and responsibility. He oversees and teaches in Executive Education’s core, global leadership programs for law firm managing partners, emerging law firm leaders and General Counsel. He also collaborates with HLS colleagues and other Harvard faculty to design and teach custom programs for law firms, law departments and other legal-related organizations. He focuses his Executive Education teaching and writing on leadership, motivation and development of professionals, and organizational alignment from a talent management and diversity and inclusion perspective. To help advance diversity in the legal profession, Professor Westfahl works closely with the Leadership Council on Legal Diversity as an advisor and strategic meeting facilitator.
Professor Westfahl joined HLS from the law firm Goodwin Procter LLP, where he served from 2004-2013 as the firm’s Director of Professional Development. In that role, he was responsible for all aspects of the professional development of the firm’s attorneys and staff, focusing on organizational and leadership development, feedback, mentoring, career progression, diversity, professional skills training, attorney and staff integration and transitions and alumni. As a Lecturer on Law from 2010-2013, he teamed with Professor David Wilkins to teach an 80-student section of the law school’s Problem Solving Workshop for first-year students. In 2008, Professor Westfahl was chosen as one of Law Firm, Inc. magazine’s five “Innovators of the Year” for his development of a cutting edge attorney assignment system and database called iStaff, which effectively ties attorney work assignments to their professional development needs. From 2009 to 2011, he served as the Chair of the Professional Development Consortium, a 450-member professional association for law firm professional development and training leaders across North America and the U.K. Professor Westfahl frequently lectures and comments upon talent development within professional services firms and is the author of the book You Get What You Measure: Lawyer Development Frameworks and Effective Performance Evaluations (NALP, 2008).
Prior to his work at Goodwin Procter, Professor Westfahl spent six years leading professional development for the Washington, D.C. office of McKinsey & Company. He is also an experienced business and federal regulatory attorney, having practiced law with Foley & Lardner’s Washington, D.C. office from 1988 to 1998. Professor Westfahl earned his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1988, and graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College in 1985.
Recent articles and white papers:
The Leadership Imperative: A Collaborative Approach to Professional Development in the Global Age of More for Less | Stanford Law Review
The Elephant In The Room: Advancing Women To Partnership | Law360
Leverage the Strength of Millennials: Finding Common Ground and Hidden Opportunities | PD Quarterly
Professor Wilkins is the Vice Dean for Global Initiatives on the Legal Profession, the Lester Kissel Professor of Law, and the faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School. He is also a senior research fellow of the American Bar Foundation and a faculty associate of the Harvard University Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics. Professor Wilkins has written extensively on the legal profession in leading scholarly journals and the popular press and is the co-author (along with his Harvard Law School colleague Andrew Kaufman) of one of the leading casebooks in the field.
His current scholarly projects on the profession include Globalization, Lawyers, and Emerging Economies (where he directs over 50 researchers studying the impact of globalization on the market for legal services in rapidly developing countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe); After the JD (a ten-year nationwide longitudinal study of lawyers’ careers); The Harvard Law School Career Study (examining, among other things, differences in the experiences of male and female graduates and the careers of lawyers who do not practice law); and The New Social Engineers (charting the historical development and current experiences of black lawyers in corporate law practice).
Professor Wilkins teaches several courses on lawyers and other related professionals, including the country’s first four credit Legal Profession course, and seminars on Legal Education for the Twenty-First Century: Global Perspectives on Preparing Lawyers for Global Careers, Cause Lawyers, and The Future(s) of the Large Law Firm. He is also one of seven Harvard Law School faculty members who will teach the school’s new required course for all first-year students entitled Problem Solving. Professor Wilkins is a principal faculty member in the Law School’s Executive Education program, where he teaches courses on Leadership in Law Firms and Leadership in Corporate Counsel. He has also served on several Law School and University committees, including the University-wide Task Force on Professional Schools.
Professor Wilkins is a frequent speaker at academic institutions and conferences, bar organizations, and law firms and other professional service organizations in the United States and around the world. He has received numerous honors and awards, including being selected as the 2009 Commencement Speaker at the University of Iowa College of Law and the 2008 Distinguished Scholar by the Order of the Coif. In 2012, he was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Education
AB, Harvard College, 1977
JD, Harvard Law School, 1980
Research and Scholarship
Rethinking the Public-Private Distinction in Legal Ethics: The Case of “Substitute” Attorneys General, 2010 Mich. St. L. Rev. 423 (2010), available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1789124.
PROBLEMS IN PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR A CHANGING PROFESSION, Carolina Academic Press (with Andrew Kaufman).
Preliminary Report, After the JD: Wave II (with Terry Adams, Ronit Dinovitzer, Bryant Garth, Robert Nelson, Gabriele Plickert, Joyce Sterling, Gita Wilder, and Rebecca Sandefur).
Team of Rivals? Toward a New Model of the Corporate Attorney/Client Relationship, in CURRENT LEGAL PROBLEMS 2009, Oxford University Press 2009, available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1517342.
Valuing diversity: Some Cautionary Lessons from the American Experience, in MANAGING THE MODERN LAW FIRM: NEW CHALLENGES, NEW PERSPECTIVES, Laura Empson, ed., Oxford University Press (2007).
Why Are There So Few Black Lawyers in Corporate Law Firms?: An Institutional Analysis, 84 Cal. L. Rev. 493 (1996) (with G. Mitu Gulati).
Who Should Regulate Lawyers?, 105 Harv. L. Rev. 801 (1992).
Presentations
20th Anniversary Celebration of the Conseil National des Barreaux of France
December 1, 2012
Paris, France
Watch video of this speech (scroll 2/3 down the page to view Professor Wilkins’ speech)
Hiring Teams, Firms and Lawyers: Evidence of the Evolving Relationship in the Corporate Legal Market
Keynote Address
University of Wisconsin Law School Symposium
November 18-19, 2011
Madison, Wisconsin
Watch video of this speech
Courses
Seminar: Globalization, Lawyers and Emerging Economies
Legal Profession
Problem Solving
Seminar: Legal Education for the Twenty-First Century: Global Perspectives on Preparing Lawyers for Global Careers
See DBW Archives here.
John C. Coates IV joined the faculty in 1997 after private practice at the New York law firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, where he was a partner specializing in mergers and acquisitions, corporate and securities law, and the regulation of financial institutions, including mutual funds.
John was named the John F. Cogan Jr. Professor of Law and Economics in 2006, chairs the faculty committee on executive education and teaches contracts, corporations, corporate governance and financial regulations. He also is a Visiting Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where he teaches finance, corporate governance and M&A.
In 2016, he was elected to the Investor Advisory Committee within the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, D.C. He is a member of the American Law Institute and the author of numerous articles on corporate, securities and financial institution law, and for seven years co-authored the leading annual survey of developments in financial institution M&A.
Mihir Desai currently serves as the Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance, the Senior Associate Dean for Planning and University Affairs, and the Chair of Doctoral Programs at Harvard Business School.
In 2011 he also accepted a joint appointment to the faculty of Harvard Law School as a tenured Professor of Law. He received his Ph.D. in political economy from Harvard University; his MBA as a Baker Scholar from Harvard Business School; and a bachelors degree in history and economics from Brown University. In 1994, he was a Fulbright Scholar to India.
Professor Desai’s areas of expertise include tax policy, international finance and corporate finance. His academic publications have appeared in leading economics, finance and public economics journals. His work has emphasized the appropriate design of tax policy in a globalized setting, the links between corporate governance and taxation, and the internal capital markets of multinational firms. His research has been cited in The Economist, BusinessWeek, The New York Times, and several other publications. He is also the author of International Finance: A Casebook (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2006) which features his many case studies on international corporate finance.
He is a Research Associate in the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Public Economics and Corporate Finance Programs, and is the co-director of the NBER’s India program. He is also on the Advisory Board of the International Tax Policy Forum.
Professor Desai teaches a second-year elective on International Financial Management and he co-teaches Public Economics at Harvard College. He received the Student Association Award for teaching excellence from the HBS Class of 2001. His professional experiences include working at CS First Boston, McKinsey & Co., and advising a number of firms and governmental organizations.
Michele DeStefano is a Professor of Law at the University of Miami and the Founder and Director of LawWithoutWalls, a multi-disciplinary, international think-tank of over 750 lawyers, business professionals, entrepreneurs, and law and business students that collaborate to solve problems and create innovations at the intersection of law, business, and technology. She is also the co-founder and co-editor of the Compliance Elliance Journal, an open access e-journal that publishes engaging authors’ works about cutting edge issues in compliance and ethics. In 2015-2016, she was a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School and visiting faculty lead of Harvard’s Center on the Legal Profession.
Recently recognized by the ABA as a Legal Rebel, Michele is an expert in entrepreneurship and innovation in the law. Her scholarship focuses on the growing intersections between law and business and legal innovation. Through qualitative interviews of general counsels and other professional service providers, Michele’s research investigates the impact changes in the law and business marketplace (including litigation funding, social media, public relations, regulation) will have on the legal profession and its potential for innovation. Her latest published research included over seventy interviews of general counsels and chief compliance officers of large, publicly traded corporations to analyze and assess the changing role of compliance and ethics. Currently, she is interviewing chief legal officers of publicly traded corporations and chief innovation officers of law firms for her upcoming book: Innovation Tournament in Law: Changing the Way Lawyers Collaborate.
In addition to spearheading LawWithoutWalls, Michele presents regularly on Innovation, Teaming, Collaboration/Culture Creation, Compliance and Ethics, Technology and Education, and Litigation Funding. She teaches courses on the changing legal profession, law, technology, and innovation, civil procedure, professional responsibility, and compliance and ethics. She is also Guest Faculty in Harvard Law School’s Executive Education program and Affiliated Faculty at Harvard Law School’s Center for the Legal Profession.
From 2003 to 2004, Michele clerked for Chief Judge William G. Young of the Federal District Court of Massachusetts. She also worked for a year as a Special Master on a patent law case. Before attending law school, she was a Senior Marketing Manager at Levi Strauss & Company (1995-1998) and an Account Executive at Leo Burnett Advertising Company (1991-1995). Michele earned a J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School and a B.A., magna cum laude, from Dartmouth College and has been admitted to the Massachusetts, Minnesota, and District of Columbia bars.
Kevin is a partner in the Møller PSF Group, based at Churchill College, in the University of Cambridge. He is a regular conference speaker both at open events and at partner retreats covering all aspects of market strategy, business development and pricing.
Kevin has a particular interest in the pricing of professional services and in business development for professionals at all stages of their careers from newly qualified to senior partners. In 2013, he co-author a Harvard Law School case study on pricing services (HLS 13-17).
With more than 25 years’ experience as a partner in the international law firm Eversheds, including 10 years as a full time member of their management team, Kevin has front line experience of the changes and challenges affecting professional service firms. He negotiated the terms of Eversheds’ ground breaking single firm deal with Tyco to provide services across 30 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for a single fee and served as their first client partner. This project was immortalized in a Harvard Law School case study (HLS 09-34).
In 2009, Kevin’s strategy to redesign services following the recession won him the Financial Times Innovation Award for Client Service and in 2010 he was the winner of the Law Society’s Excellence Award for Innovation. He studied for his MBA at Henley Management College and completed the Harvard Business School Leadership Program.
As a member of the Møller Professional Service Firms Group, Kevin designs and delivers partner level training programmes and has worked with partners and senior associates from all over the world. He has a particular interest in personal impact and brand for professionals and has carried out extensive research on client buying behaviour. A member of the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply, Kevin engages with procurement professionals to understand how they can best work with Professional Service Firms and also how Partners can best deal with professional buyers.
Kevin has carried out research into decision making behaviours in particular so that he can understand how partners can best influence clients and other decision makers. His course on “Influencing Skills for Partners” is his most recent teaching programme.
His book “Mastering Services Pricing” is being published by Pearson / Financial Times in late 2014.
Heidi K. Gardner, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession, a Lecturer on Law, and Faculty Chair of the school’s Accelerated Leadership Program. She was previously a professor at Harvard Business School. Her research, teaching, speaking and consulting focus on leadership and collaboration in professional service firms, and her book “Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Siloes” will be published this year by Harvard Business Press. Her first book, “Leadership for Lawyers: Essential Strategies for Law Firm Success” (Globe Business & Law Publishing) was released in 2015.
Previously on the faculty at Harvard Business School, she teaches continues to teach executive courses at HBS, Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard’s learning centers in Shanghai, China and Doha, Qatar. She is also an International Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Said Business School.
Dr. Gardner’s research was awarded the Academy of Management’s prize for Outstanding Practical Implications for Management. She has published articles in the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Harvard Business Review, Law Practice Today, and the Financial Times. She has also published numerous book chapters focusing on organizational behavior, cultural intelligence, multinational teams, professional collaboration, and the management of professional service firms. Her research has been featured in media such as The Economist, Boston Globe, MSN.com, CNN Money, Fortune.com and CBSNews.com.
Dr. Gardner earned a BA in Japanese Studies from the University of Pennsylvania (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa), a Masters from the London School of Economics (highest distinction) and a second Masters and PhD from London Business School. Dr. Gardner has lived and worked on four continents. She previously worked as a management consultant for McKinsey & Co. in London, Johannesburg and New York, and as a manager for Procter & Gamble. She also held a Fulbright fellowship in Germany, and studied and taught in Japan.
A Professor of Business Administration in the Negotiations, Organizations & Markets Unit at HBS, Francesca Gino is also formally affiliated with the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and with the Mind, Brain, Behavior Initiative at Harvard University. Professor Gino has long studied the factors at play when judgment and decision making collide with the results of our choices in real life.
In her first book, “Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed and How We Can Stick to the Plan” (Harvard Business Review Press, February 2013), she explores inconsistent decisions played out in a wide range of circumstances – from our roles as consumers, employees and leaders to the choices we make more broadly as human beings. By recognizing the common forces that derail our decisions and then correcting them, we can more successfully stay on track in both our personal and professional lives.
Professor Gino’s research on judgment and decision making, negotiation, social influence, ethics and creativity have been discussed on CNN and NPR, featured in leading business publications, including Economist, Financial Times, New York Times, Newsweek and Scientific American, and published in numerous academic journals, including Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Organization Science and Psychological Science. She has earned major research awards from the National Science Foundation and the Academy of Management.
In addition to teaching, she advises firms and not-for-profit organizations in the areas of negotiation, decision making and organizational behavior. Before joining the HBS faculty, Professor Gino taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School and at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to her Carnegie Mellon appointment, she spent two years at HBS as a postdoctoral fellow, lecturer and senior researcher. A native of Italy, Professor Gino holds a Ph.D. in economics and management from the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa. She is a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Trento.
Ashish Nanda is a faculty member at Harvard Business School.
From 2013 to 2017, he was Director of Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. Before joining IIMA, he was Robert Braucher Professor of Practice at Harvard Law School for seven years. Before that, he was a Harvard Business School faculty member for 13 years. Nanda was Fellow, Harvard Business School Executive Education from 2013 to 2017 and Officiating Director, IIM Nagpur from its inception in 2015 to 2017. He is Distinguished Fellow, Harvard Law School Executive Education. Professor Nanda stepped aside as Director, IIMA in September 2017 and in October 2017 joined the Strategy Unit of Harvard Business School.
Nanda’s research, teaching, and advisory work focus on leadership, particularly in the context of professional services and institutions of higher education. He has published case studies and articles on professional services in three primary streams – management of professional service organizations, professionals’ labor markets, and professionalism. During his stint as Director, IIMA, Nanda has written on, and participated in conferences and task forces related to, administration of higher education institutions, particularly Indian professional schools.
Nanda’s wife is a faculty member of Tufts Dental School, Boston, and his son is studying Medicine at Columbia University, New York. Nanda is fond of reading and playing squash.
Felix Oberholzer-Gee is the Andreas Andresen Professor of Business Administration and Chair, MBA Global, Harvard Business School. A member of the faculty since 2003, Professor Oberholzer- Gee received his Master’s degree, summa cum laude, and his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Zurich. His first faculty position was at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He currently teaches competitive strategy in executive education programs such as the Program for Leadership Development, the Senior Executive Program for China, and in a program for media executives titled Effective Strategies for Media Companies.
His course Strategies Beyond the Market is a popular elective class for second-year MBA students. Professor Oberholzer-Gee won numerous awards for excellence in teaching, including the Harvard Business School Class of 2006 Faculty Teaching Award for best teacher in the core curriculum, and the 2002 Helen Kardon Moss Anvil Award for best teacher in the Wharton MBA program. Prior to his academic career, Professor Oberholzer-Gee served as managing director of Symo Electronics, a Swiss-based process control company.
Professor Oberholzer-Gee’s research and consulting are centered on competitive strategy, international competition, and non-market strategy, a branch of strategic management that studies how companies best work with government and non-governmental groups. In recent work, he studied how entertainment companies can successfully manage the digital transition. Dating back to a study abroad program as an undergraduate, Professor Oberholzer-Gee has a long-standing interest in the Chinese economy and Chinese companies. In recent academic work, he compared the financial performance of Chinese companies with the performance of multinationals operating in China. In a related study, he explored how and why Chinese companies diversify their activities. Professor Oberholzer-Gee’s academic work has been published in the very best, peer-reviewed journals of his profession, including the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Financial Economics, and Journal of Law & Economics. His work has been profiled by media outlets around the world, including ABC Nightly News, Financial Times, Guardian, Le Figaro, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, New York Times, Singapore Straits Times, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post.
Professor Hillary A. Sale is a Professor of Law at Georgetown Law. Professor Sale is an expert in securities and corporate governance, ranks among the nation’s best scholars, teachers, and leaders in corporate and securities law. She is a frequent speaker to industry and academics on corporate governance, leadership and women’s leadership, and was selected as one of the 25 Most Influential Women in Business for 2014 by the St. Louis Business Journal. She was the Sullivan & Cromwell Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School in the spring of 2017, where she taught Women’s Leadership and Corporate Boards and Governance.
She is the co-author, with John C. Coffee and M. Todd Henderson, of a casebook on federal securities regulation, now in its 13th edition, and of a book on federal securities laws, rules, and forms. She has written extensively on various matters, including: redesigning the SEC, independent directors as securities monitors, derivative litigation, and corporate law and governance. Three of her articles were selected by Corporate Practice Commentator as among the annual “top ten” corporate and securities law articles. Professor Sale also regularly presents her scholarship at conferences and workshops throughout the country. At the law school, she is a recipient of the David M. Becker Professor of the Year Award and she also holds a courtesy appointment as a professor of management at the Olin School of Business. Among her professional affiliations, she is a member of the Executive Committee of DirectWomen and Chair of the DirectWomen Board Institute, an organization dedicated to educating women attorneys about public company boards. She also is a member of the American Law Institute and a member of the ABA Corporate Laws Committee. She previously was the F. Arnold Daum Chair in Corporate Finance and Law at the University of Iowa, where she received the President’s Collegiate Teaching Award. Before becoming a law professor, she clerked for the Hon. Richard S. Arnold, Chief Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, and practiced law with Wilmer Hale LLP (formerly Hale and Dorr LLP) in Boston, specializing in corporate and securities litigation and internal investigations. She also held several positions with government entities in Massachusetts.
Guhan Subramanian is the Joseph Flom Professor of Law and Business at Harvard Law School and the H. Douglas Weaver Professor of Business Law at Harvard Business School. He is the first person in the history of Harvard University to hold tenured appointments at both Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School. At HLS he teaches courses in negotiations and corporate law. At HBS, he teaches in several executive education programs, such as Strategic Negotiations, Changing the Game, and Making Corporate Boards More Effective. He is the faculty chair for the JD/MBA program at Harvard University and the Vice Chair for Research at the Harvard Program on Negotiation. Prior to joining the Harvard faculty he spent three years at McKinsey & Company in their New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C. offices.
Professor Subramanian’s research explores topics in negotiations, corporate dealmaking, and deal process design. He has published articles in the Stanford Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Harvard Business Review, and the Harvard Law Review, among other places. His work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal’s “Heard on the Street” column, the New York Times, the American Lawyer, The Deal’s “Corporate Control Alert”. His new book Negotiauctions: New Dealmaking Strategies for a Competitive Marketplace (Norton 2010) synthesizes the findings from his research and teaching over the past decade.
Professor Subramanian has been involved in major public-company deals such as Oracle’s $10.3 billion hostile takeover bid for PeopleSoft, Cox Enterprises’ $8.9 billion freeze-out of the minority shareholders in Cox Communications, the $6.6 billion leveraged buyout of Toys “R” Us, and Exelon’s $8.0 billion hostile takeover bid for NRG. He also advises individuals, boards of directors, and management teams on issues of dealmaking and corporate governance.
Professor Subramanian holds degrees in Economics, Law, and Business, all from Harvard University.