Catalog

Overview: This course offers a unique opportunity to explore the rewards and challenges of serving as coordinating legal counsel in business transactions in an increasingly global marketplace. The course, based in London (NYLS Summer Study Abroad Program)and with a study excursion to Paris, will offer an interactive, hands-on simulation approach built around realistic business transaction scenarios and working meetings with leading professionals and experts in their fields.

Study Curriculum: The program is designed around a series of mock client simulations depicting U.S.-based commercial clients with proposed projects (located primarily in the United Kingdom and France) and who have engaged the class participants as coordinating counsel. The simulations will have a particular focus on real estate projects, but with learning points of application in other types of commercial transactions.

The course will begin with several orientation lectures by the faculty, accompanied by directed reading, to illustrate the remarkable differences in legal systems, business expectations, and cultural approaches around the world. We will also discuss techniques and approaches to effective business lawyering in this environment. This will provide a background and tools to prepare the class participants for their role as project leaders and coordinating counsel in the simulation projects at the core of this course.

The class will be presented with a series of client objectives and will have the opportunity to identify issues, form questions and develop strategies to address each project scenario. To facilitate this work, the class will meet with experienced professionals (who may include lawyers, real estate advisors and brokers, institutional investors, property and architectural professionals, and in continental Europe notaries). These professionals are volunteers who will have advance preparation about the case study facts. In response to questions presented by the class, the professionals will give their preliminary advice and cautions about how to organize and advance the clients’ goals and interests. After the visits, the class will convene to exchange ideas and to incorporate the professionals’ comments into the proposed project approach.

Supplementing these meetings will be a series of arranged site visits, part tour and part lecture. While the specific sites and arrangements will be confirmed closer to the date of the trip, we plan to visit several large commercial (office, warehouse and industrial, or retail) developments, one or more smaller scale projects with interesting or quirky case histories, and several large public projects. At some sites, we will meet with executives, property managers or docents who will enhance our visit with concise lectures or commentary about the history and background of the projects. We envision that several of these visits will offer “behind the scenes” opportunities not available to the public.

Those participants enrolling in the program for academic credit will be required to complete a final examination, one segment of which will involve outlining their conclusions and advice to the mock clients about the simulation project as a logical capstone to the problem solving that has evolved throughout the trip.