In the fast-paced world of corporate America, it is becoming clear that a legal education grounded solely in theory is no longer going to cut it. Recently, some of the nation's top law schools have begun to infuse their traditional business law curriculums, once very theory heavy, with a much more real world and practical approach. Law schools are slowly trading in their conventional teaching methods in favor of much more innovative efforts previously reserved for litigation law.

The growing number of business law clinics — a rarity not too long ago — is just one example of the way law schools are rising to the challenge and revamping their business law curriculums to suit the needs and demands of the corporate world.

"This is an idea that is just beginning to emerge in American law schools. It is only in the last few years that we've really taught transactional law in this way," said Thomas Morsch, professor of clinical law at Northwestern University School of Law, in Chicago, as well as director of the school's Small Business Opportunity Center (SBOC). "I think we're about 100 years behind the medical profession. Before we turn our students loose on the public, we ought to give them some hands-on experience." The SBOC gives students experience representing entrepreneurs, small businesses and nonprofit organizations.

According to Morsch, law schools have historically reserved clinical teaching approaches for the litigation courses — overlooking the myriad benefits that this kind of approach could also lend to business law students. "When you have a client in front of you, when it's real, it all just makes sense. It's so much better than just reading about it in some books," he said.

Morsch added that over the past few years he has noticed a slow shift in business law education from the theoretical to the practical. "Business clients expect their lawyers to be problem solvers. They don't want theory. They want good, practical solutions to business problems," he said.

But Morsch cautioned that a balance between the theoretical and the practical was the key to a well-rounded business law education. "I still think that the primary mission of law schools is to teach legal reasoning and analysis," he said. However, he added that also emphasizing the practical aspects of business law was essential in order to better prepare the students.

At a time when law schools are just beginning to see beyond conventional methods of teaching business law, George Washington University Law School, in Washington, is proud of its reputation as one of the pioneers of this approach. The GW Small Business Clinic/Economic Development Project has been around since 1977 — making it one of the oldest such clinics in America.

"When we started, there were less than a handful of business clinics. Most modern clinics were geared toward litigation," said Susan Jones, the clinic's director and supervising lawyer, as well as a member of the ABA Business Law Section's Committee on Business Law Education. "People just didn't see the connection between business clinics and social justice."

The purposes of the clinic are to provide the students with skills training as part of the school's clinical legal education program, as well as to represent small businesses, nonprofits and artists who cannot afford to pay for a lawyer. Most of the clients are micro-businesses comprised of one to five people and with a startup capital of less than $5,000. Second-year and third-year law students work under the close supervision of the clinic's director in order to provide legal assistance to their clients.

The students gain practical experience in interviewing clients and drafting legal documents, such as articles of incorporation, bylaws, contracts and applications for licenses and permits. They also provide legal research along with tax and business counseling. "The small business clinics that are emerging are a way for law students to understand what businesses need," Jones said.

Vanderbilt University Law School, in Nashville, Tenn., is not one to be left behind when it comes to adapting its business law curriculum to meet the demands of a changing business world. Laurie Hauber, visiting assistant clinical professor of law at Vanderbilt, launched the Economic & Community Development Clinic in the spring of 2004. She agreed that there seems to be a growing trend of law schools taking a more practical approach to the teaching of business law — although it's happening at a slow pace.

"Every year we get e-mails from people wanting to start their own business clinics. New people show up at our national conferences. The interest is definitely growing," Hauber said. "Law schools realize that students and firms are demanding this now and they're trying to find ways to meet that need."

According to Hauber, students who are going into litigation practices have generally been much more prepared than those entering the arena of business law. "It's a very necessary change if students are supposed to graduate and have some level of preparation. The whole idea is to give students who are interested in transactional work solid business law experience that they can then take with them and apply to their practice," she said.

And several of the nation's law firms are applauding these law schools' shift toward a more practical education.

"Law school prepares you so well to be a litigator. It's more challenging to find the same kind of preparation for business law," said David Gerson, local practice group manager for the business and finance sections at Morgan Lewis Counselors at Law in Pittsburgh.

Gerson, who was the former hiring partner at the Pittsburgh office, said that Morgan Lewis' business law departments look for students with strong contract drafting and negotiation skills. He recommends that students fine tune their contract drafting skills as well as ensure that they have a strong business background in order to set themselves apart from the competition.

He emphasized the need for lawyers to be as familiar with the business aspects of their practice as they are with the legal concerns. "I would advise them (students) to be as enthusiastic about business as they are about the law," Gerson said.

And many law schools have tailored their business law curriculums to reflect the interdisciplinary nature of the profession.

Vanderbilt is making a name for itself as an innovator in the field of teaching business law. The law school's Law and Business Program, an interdisciplinary initiative now in its fifth year, is recognition of the inextricable link between law and business in today's corporate society.

To accommodate students interested in a career in business law, Vanderbilt has joined with the university's Owen Graduate School of Management to provide students with the unique opportunity to study business law and corporate management in classes co-taught by professors from both the law and business schools. Students can still graduate within three years and graduates of the program receive their J.D. from the law school as well as a certificate of specialization in law and business, according to the law school's Web site.

Anthony Luppino, an associate professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) Law School and faculty co-director of the UMKC Entrepreneurial Legal Services Clinic, is currently conducting research on ways to use interdisciplinary education to better train business lawyers — with an emphasis on lawyers who will represent entrepreneurs.

"Different disciplines have their own vocabularies and ways of approaching problems," Luppino said. "Good lawyers learn that on the job. Many of us think lawyers need to learn that earlier on."

Luppino is a member of the Kauffman Entrepreneurial Faculty Scholars (KEFS) program, a pilot project that has brought together 11 faculty members from diverse disciplines in the Kansas City area to promote initiatives in interdisciplinary education in entrepreneurship. Luppino is currently the only law school faculty member participating in the KEFS program and is already hard at work helping remold UMKC's business law curriculum.

He has encouraged further progress toward a more interdisciplinary approach in the law school as well as incorporated principles of entrepreneurship into the UMKC law school curriculum. Some of the ways he has worked toward these goals are the following: In the fall of 2004, he redesigned and taught a business planning course with an emphasis on entrepreneurship. He was also the team leader on the design of UMKC's Solo and Small Law Firm Institute and co-taught a new course in entrepreneurial lawyering in the summer of 2004.

In addition, Luppino has also collaborated with other business faculty on the design and implementation of the law school's Business and Entrepreneurial Law Concentration (a type of law school "major"), which presents opportunities for concentrated study in the areas of particular value to students interested in business planning and entrepreneurship.

UMKC is attempting to further reshape its business law curriculum by offering more interdisciplinary classes to students that are co-taught by the business and law school's faculty. The school is also trying to bring more practicing business lawyers and businessmen as guest lecturers to share their wealth of practical experiences with the students.

Marcus Cole, associate dean for curriculum at Stanford Law School, agreed that one way in which business law training can be improved is by increasing the interaction between the classes and the business law community.

With this goal in mind, Stanford is making a commitment to offer joint courses with the university's business and law schools. The courses involve bringing in real people from the business world who present students with actual problems that occur in their practice, and then asking the students to come up with possible solutions. "I think that's the future of business law training," Cole said.

Matthew Gorson, a national operating shareholder for the Miami office of Greenberg Traurig LLP in charge of hiring young lawyers, said that he agreed that bringing in more practicing lawyers to speak to students would give students a more realistic taste of what awaits them. "Most faculty members are very academic and not out in the real world. They're certainly not closing everyday transactions," he said.

Gorson said he realized early on that something was missing in most law schools business law curriculums.

"They generally come out completely unprepared in terms of business law. Their minds are well trained in thinking like a lawyer, but not necessarily in thinking like business people," Gorson said. "I think the way law schools have traditionally taught, with the Socratic method and case exams, is ultimately counterproductive to preparing the best business lawyers."

He said he would like to see a more practical, solution-oriented approach to teaching business law with a special focus on lawyers' relationships with their clients. "That's something I've been preaching for 10 years," he said.

Dina Schlossberg, a practice associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School — another one of the first law schools in the country to recognize a need for a clinical approach to teaching business law — said she is beginning to see a real recognition among law schools of the way law is deeply integrated with other disciplines, especially that of business. The law school enjoys a very close relationship with the business school and students can go back and forth between the two schools.

"We feel like what we're doing is helping to round out the curriculum. It allows for a much more rich and deep analysis," said Schlossberg, who is also the faculty supervisor of the law school's small business clinic. "The relationships between law firms and law schools have changed. The demanding and competitive nature of these firms requires that people not come in so green."

Although Schlossberg agreed that many law schools are now trying to expand their clinical programs to include the areas of intellectual property, business law and immigration law, there is still work to be done. "A lot of law schools are going in the direction of trying new techniques. A lot are not. A lot are still really, really theoretic," she said. "A lot of students don't feel grounded. There's this fear of what's going to happen when they go out into the real world."

And business law clinics allow students to see their course material come alive. "They have to tease out what they learn from theoretical class into something that can be used in real world practice — while still keeping with a vigorous academic setting," she said. "They gain skills that give them the confidence to go into an 'eat or be eaten' environment."

According to Charles Tabb, associate dean at the University of Illinois College of Law, in Champaign, the change in the way law schools are teaching business law requires that the students expand their mindsets.

"They have to see beyond purely legal issues. We have to get students to start thinking in a transactional or counseling mode," Tabb said. "That's the kind of thinking lawyers have to do in the real world."

Another critical issue that is beginning to gain more recognition among law schools is the question of how to teach ethics within a corporate law context. In light of the recent high-profile corporate fraud cases such as the Enron scandal, it is becoming painfully clear that more attention needs to be paid to understanding the ethical dilemmas that arise in the business world.

William Woodward, professor at Temple University James Beasley School of Law, in Philadelphia, said that it's crucial that law schools shift their focus from litigation to transactional settings when it comes to discussing ethics. He added that another major critique is that law schools often fail to incorporate ethical components throughout all the courses — often just limiting this type of discussion to the required professional responsibility course.

"Most people in law schools leave ethics issues for ethics courses. They don't deal with it within other courses because it's not 'their course' — it's seen as a peripheral issue," Woodward said. "But I don't think you can effectively teach ethics just in the ethics course."

Amy Boss, also a professor at Temple and former chair of the ABA's Business Law Section, stressed the importance of looking at ethical issues in the context of corporate law. "We need to sensitize people to the fact that ethical issues are not limited to litigation," Boss said. "The challenge is to heighten the sensitivity as to what transpires in transactional practice."

One way that the James Beasley School of Law is responding to this challenge is through its ground-breaking Integrated Transactional Program, a 10-credit, two-semester course that combines transactional work with professional responsibility, launched in 1994.

The course offers students the unique opportunity to work on six simulated client matters and hone their interviewing, negotiation and drafting skills, said Eleanor Myers, who teaches the course. The interactive and real-world approach that the course takes allows students to see their course material come to life. The students take on the role of the lawyers and students who have already taken the course play the role of the clients.

Throughout the course, students are also forced to come face to face with various ethical scenarios. For example, in one of the simulations, one minute before the lawyer (played by a student) is supposed to appear before the IRS, the client reveals to him or her some information that renders their application false. The student then has to decide what the ethical issues are and what he or she should do.

"In a regular ethics course, the ethics issues are too abstract. Students don't really know what to do. This is a much more vivid and realistic experience," Myers said. "They sweat. They get upset. They have nightmares — they have all this range of experiences as if they had really gone through the situation."

Myers said that it has been a real challenge for her to find textbooks that address ethics from a transactional perspective, as she attempts to do in her classes. "In transactional law, it's not so clear. It's not always a right or wrong answer. I think that's where the really difficult questions arise," she said. "But I want to impress on them that they can be good lawyers and still keep their sense of honesty and integrity. Business lawyers have to be able to talk the language of the client without necessarily adopting all their values."

According to Edward Kim, a shareholder with the Silicon Valley office of Heller and Ehrman LLP, many of the ethical questions that come up in transactional work are actually accounting or business issues. He said that lawyers are intimately involved with the business dealings of their clients and this requires that lawyers become as well versed in the business concerns as they are in the legal concerns.

"If those lawyers have a strong ethical compass — they're in a good position to help their clients make good choices and do the right things," Kim said. "Nowadays, with all that's going on in corporate America, I can't imagine what can be more important than that."

Lacey Bundy, a recent graduate from Northwestern University's School of Law and former president of the Small Business Opportunity Center's student board, said that the innovative and real-world experience she has gained has prepared her well for a practice in business law. Her participation in the SBOC, where she assisted women and minority-owned small businesses trying to get their operations off the ground, allowed her to develop her drafting skills as well as understand how to effectively communicate with her clients.

Bundy said she especially benefited from being able to take classes at the business school, as well as the law school's "structuring transaction" classes, a series of small classes focusing on a diverse group of areas such as real estate as well as mergers and acquisitions. These classes are usually taught by partners from major Chicago law firms who come in as guest lecturers.

All in all, Bundy feels confident that her legal education, with its balance of the theoretical and the practical, the traditional and the unconventional, has enriched her potential as a young business lawyer. "It's a tremendous method as far as learning," Bundy said. "I definitely feel like I'm ready to hit the ground running."