Our core teaching team is comprised of Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School faculty in addition to distinguished faculty from other law and business schools. These academicians, educators, researchers, authors, and practitioners are experts of 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.
To view a complete list of faculty by program, use the drop down menu (“Search By Faculty Type”) above to select the program of interest.
Faculty Director, Harvard Law School Executive Education
Faculty Chair, Leadership in Law Firms
Professor of Practice, Harvard Law School
Scott Westfahl is the Faculty Director of Harvard Law School Executive Education (HLSEE) and also teaches courses on problem solving, teams, networks and innovation within the law school’s J.D. curriculum. As the Faculty Director of HLSEE, he leads Harvard Law School’s 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 HLSEE’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. He is the Faculty Chair of the Leadership in Law Firms program.
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
Faculty Chair, Leadership in Corporate Counsel
Vice Dean, Global Initiatives on the Legal Profession
Faculty Director, Center on the Legal Profession
Lester Kissel Professor of Law
Professor David B. Wilkins is the Lester Kissel Professor of Law, Vice Dean for Global Initiatives on the Legal Profession, and 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 Fellow of the Harvard University Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics. Professor Wilkins has written over 80 articles on the legal profession in leading scholarly journals and the popular press, and is the co-author or editor of five books, including one of the leading casebooks in the field. Professor Wilkins is the Faculty Chair of Leadership in Corporate Counsel.
His current scholarly projects include Globalization, Lawyers, and Emerging Economies, The State of Black Alumni at Harvard Law School, Disruptive Innovation in the Market for Legal Services, After the J.D., and the Reemergence of the Big Four Accountancy Networks in the Market for Legal Services. Professor Wilkins teaches several courses on lawyers, including The Legal Profession, and Challenges of a General Counsel. In 2007, he co-founded Harvard Law School’s Executive Education Program, where he teaches in several courses including Leadership in Law Firms and Leadership in Corporate Counsel.
Professor Wilkins has given over 50 endowed lectures at universities around the world and is a frequent speaker at professional conferences and law firm and corporate retreats. He holds honorary degrees from Roger Williams University (2017) and Stockholm University in Sweden (2012), and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Harvard Law School Alumni Award (2016); the Aptissimi Award for Academic Excellence from ESADE UNIVERSITY in Spain (2014); the Distinguished Visiting Mentor Award from Australia National University (2012), the American Bar Foundation Scholar of the Year Award (2010), the J. Clay Smith Award from Howard University School of Law (2009), and the Order of the Coif Distinguished Scholar Award (2008). In 2012, Professor Wilkins was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2014 he was selected as a Corresponding Member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Doctors.
Faculty Chair: Mergers & Acquisitions: Structuring and Leading Deals
John F. Cogan, Jr. Professor of Law & Economics, Harvard Law School
Research Director, Center on the Legal Profession and Vice Dean for Finance and Strategic Initiatives, Harvard Law School
John Coates is the John F. Cogan, Jr. Professor of Law and Economics at Harvard Law School, where he also serves as the Vice Dean for Finance and Strategic Initiatives, and Research Director of the Center on the Legal Profession. He 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. Professor Coates is the Faculty Chair of Mergers and Acquisitions: Structuring and Leading Deals.
Before joining Harvard, he was a partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, specializing in financial institutions and M&A. He has testified before Congress and provided consulting services to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the U.S. Department of Treasury, the New York Stock Exchange, and participants in the financial markets, including hedge funds, investment banks, and private equity funds. He served as independent consultant for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in one of the first “Fair Fund” distributions (an enforcement action regarding payment for order flow), and one of the largest distributions ($306 million relating to market timing and late trading), and is currently the Chair of the Investor-as-Owner Subcommittee of the Investor Advisory Committee of the SEC. He has served as an independent representative of individual and institutional clients of institutional trustees and money managers, and currently is serving as a DOJ-appointed independent monitor for one of the Global Systemically Important Financial Institutions.
Program Chair: Transforming Client Relationships Through Innovation
Professor of Law, University of Miami School of Law
Founder and Director of LawWithoutWalls, MoveLaw, and the Compliance Elliance Journal
Affiliated Faculty, Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession
Recently recognized by the ABA as a Legal Rebel, Michele is a Professor at the University of Miami School of law, affiliated faculty at Harvard Law School, and the founder of LawWithoutWalls, a multi-disciplinary, international think-tank of over 1000 lawyers, business professionals, entrepreneurs, and law and business students who collaborate to 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. Through her company MoveLaw, Michele runs bespoke, experiential learning workshops and programs that have a human-centered design approach and are designed to transform how lawyers collaborate with their clients to creatively solve problems and to create culture change.
Michele writes about the growing intersections between law, business, and legal innovation. Her upcoming book, Legal Upheaval: A Guide to Creativity + Collaboration + Innovation in Law, will be published April 2018 and is based in part on over 100 interviews with General Counsels at international corporations and Heads of Innovation at law firms. Michele speaks and serves as a consultant and facilitator at law firms, legal departments, and startups on Innovation, Teaming, Collaboration, Creative Problem Solving, Human-Centered Design, Culture Creation, Compliance/Ethics, and Technology and Cross-practice, Cross-border initiatives.
In addition to teaching law at the University of Miami, Michele teaches in Harvard Law School’s, Executive Education Program for law firm leaders and she is also Guest Faculty at IE Law School in Spain. Michele received her J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School and her B.A., magna cum laude, from Dartmouth College.
Program Chair, Accelerated Leadership Program
Program Chair, Sector Leadership Master Class
Program Chair, Smart Collaboration Master Class
Distinguished Fellow in the Center on the Legal Profession
Heidi K. Gardner, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession and Faculty Chair of the Accelerated Leadership Program, Sector Leadership Master Class, and Smart Collaboration Master Class.
Previously she was a professor at Harvard Business School. Dr. Gardner’s book Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos became a Washington Post bestseller. Named by Thinkers 50 as a Next Generation Business Guru, Dr. Gardner co-founded the research and advisory firm Gardner & Co.
Dr. Gardner’s next book, Smarter Collaboration, will be published by Harvard Business Press in 2022. Altogether, she has authored (or co-authored) more than 80 books, chapters, case studies, and articles. Her research received the Academy of Management’s prize for Outstanding Practical Implications for Management, and has been selected three times for Harvard Business Review’s “best of” collections. Her research has been featured in major media outlets around the globe.
Dr. Gardner has lived and worked on four continents, including as a Fulbright Fellow, and for McKinsey & Co. and Procter & Gamble. 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.
Program Chair: Women’s Leadership Initiative
Program Chair: Women’s Leadership: Adapting and Advocating in a Remote Environment
Professor of Law, Georgetown Law
Affiliated Faculty, McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University
Hillary A. Sale is a recognized expert in leadership and corporate governance. She has been a member of the FINRA Board of Governors since 2016, where she Chairs the Regulatory Policy Committee and serves on the Executive, Nominating and Governance, Compensation, and Regulatory Operations Committees. She is also a member of the Advisory Board of Foundation Press, an educational publisher of scholarly books, and a director with DirectWomen, a nonprofit focused on increasing the presence of women on public company boards. Hillary is the Chair of the DirectWomen Board Institute and serves on DirectWomen’s Executive, Nominating and Governance, and Selection Committees.
Hillary is also the Associate Dean for Strategy, an award-winning scholar, and the Agnes Williams Sesquicentennial Professor of Law and Professor of Management at Georgetown University. As an industry-focused academic, she writes and speaks about leadership and corporate governance. In the spring of 2017, she was the Sullivan & Cromwell Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, teaching Corporate Boards and Governance and Leadership.
She is an accomplished business partner who speaks to industry groups and academic audiences and was selected by the St. Louis Business Journal as a “2014 Most Influential Business Woman.” In addition to running governance and leadership programs, Hillary consults regularly with CEOs and C-suite executives on leadership, governance, strategy, inclusion and diversity, and company culture. And, she works with business leaders in both custom executive education programs and programs at Harvard Law School Executive Education, where she Chairs the Women’s Leadership Initiative and Women’s Leadership: Adapting and Advocating in a Remote Environment program, and at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business and the Law Center.
Hillary graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and holds a master’s degree in Economics from Boston University, where she also completed her B.A., summa cum laude. Before joining the Georgetown faculty, she was the Walter D. Coles Professor of Law and a Professor of Management at Washington University in St. Louis. Hillary also worked in the government investigations and corporate and securities class actions areas at WilmerHale, LLP and in Massachusetts politics.
Faculty Chair, Leading Change for Lawyers
Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School
Farayi Chipungu teaches Exercising Leadership: The Politics of Change. She also serves as faculty on several executive education programs at Harvard. In addition to teaching at the Kennedy School, Farayi works as a strategy consultant with McKinsey & Company a global management consulting firm where she works with leaders and teams across the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors to deliver large-scale performance transformation programs. Some of her recent projects include restructuring a national primary health care system, redesigning performance management systems of a 20,000-person multi-national bank to improve employee alignment with management’s strategic goals, and performing diagnostics to identify and build functional and leadership capability gaps in a multi-year organizational transformation project.
In addition to this work, Farayi’s experience also includes five years of practice as a corporate lawyer in England and Australia and time spent with Cambridge Leadership Associates, a New York-based firm which specializes in delivering transformational programs centered around the adaptive leadership framework. Farayi has degrees in Arts and Law from Monash University in Australia and is also a graduate of the Kennedy School where she completed her MPA.
Faculty Chair, Computer Science for Lawyers
Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science in the Harvard Graduate School of Engineering and Applied Sciences;
Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education
David J. Malan is Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and a Member of the Faculty of Education in the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. He received his A.B., S.M., and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the same in 1999, 2004, and 2007, respectively. He teaches Computer Science 50, otherwise known as CS50, which is Harvard University‘s largest course, Yale University‘s largest course, and edX‘s largest MOOC. He also teaches at Harvard Extension School and Harvard Summer School. All of his courses are available as OpenCourseWare.
Previously, Malan served as Chief Information Officer for Mindset Media. While in graduate school, he worked part-time for the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office as a forensic investigator, after which he founded his own startup. On the side, he volunteered as an emergency medical technician (EMT-B) for MIT-EMS. He continues to volunteer as an EMT-B for the American Red Cross.
Malan’s research in graduate school focused primarily on cybersecurity and digital forensics. His dissertation was entitled Rapid Detection of Botnets through Collaborative Networks of Peers. His more recent publications focus on pedagogy and instructional technologies.
