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.
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. 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
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.
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 & 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.
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.
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 both the Accelerated Leadership Program and Sector Leadership Master Class. 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.
Professor Hillary A. Sale is an award-winning scholar and teacher, and a Professor of Law at Georgetown Law, and an Affiliated Faculty Member at the McDonough School of Business, at Georgetown University. She teaches courses on Corporate Governance, Corporate Law, Leadership, and Women and Leadership. In the spring of 2017, she was the Sullivan & Cromwell Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where she taught Women’s Leadership and Corporate Boards and Governance.
Professor Sale is a member of the FINRA Board of Governors, where she serves on the Nominating and Governance, Compensation, and Regulatory Operations Committees. She is also a member of the Advisory Board of Foundation Press, and the Advisory Board of DirectWomen, a nonprofit focused on increasing the presence of women on public company boards. She is Chair of the DirectWomen Board Institute.
She is an expert on and frequent speaker to industry groups and academic audiences about leadership and corporate governance and was selected by the St. Louis Business Journal as a “2014 Most Influential Business Women.” In addition to running leadership and other programs in industry, Professor Sale has taught in multiple executive education programs, including the Harvard Law School Leadership in Law Firms program and Women’s Leadership Initiative (for which she is the Program Chair) and various programs through the Washington University Olin School of Business.
Before entering academia, Sale was a law clerk to The Honorable Richard S. Arnold, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, practiced with the law firm of WilmerHale LLP, and was Chief of Staff and Director of Operations for Evelyn F. Murphy, the Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts. She 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. Prior to joining the Georgetown faculty, she was the F. Arnold Daum Chair in Corporate Finance and Law at the University of Iowa College of Law and the Walter D. Coles Professor of Law and a Professor of Management at Washington University in St. Louis.