Guhan Subramanian

Guhan Subramanian is the Joseph Flom Professor of Law and Business at the Harvard Law School and the Douglas Weaver Professor of Business Law at the Harvard Business School.  He is the first person in the history of Harvard University to hold tenured appointments at both HLS and HBS.  At HLS he teaches courses in negotiations and corporate law.  At HBS he teaches in several executive education programs, such as Strategic Negotiations, Making Corporate Boards More Effective, and the Advanced Management Program.   He is the faculty chair for the JD/MBA program at Harvard University, the Harvard Program on Negotiation, the Mergers & Acquisitions executive education course at HBS, and the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility at Harvard University.  Prior to joining the Harvard faculty he spent three years at McKinsey & Company.

Professor Subramanian’s research explores topics in corporate law, corporate governance, and negotiations.  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.  Twelve of his articles have been selected as being among the “top ten” articles published in corporate and securities law in their respective years, among the 400+ articles that are published each year, by scholars in the field.   The two-volume treatise Law & Economics of Mergers & Acquisitions, which includes 33 “seminal” articles from the field over the past 45 years, contains four of his articles, more than from any other scholar.  His article “Corporate Governance 2.0” was selected as a McKinsey Award finalist, for best article published in the Harvard Business Review in 2015.  His book Dealmaking: The New Strategy of Negotiauctions synthesizes the findings from his research and teaching from the past two decades.  It has been translated into Chinese (Mandarin), German, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish.  He is also a co-author of Commentaries and Cases on the Law of Business Organization, a leading textbook in the field of corporate law.

Professor Subramanian has been involved in major public-company deals such as Cox Enterprises’ $9 billion freeze-out of the minority shareholders in Cox Communications, Exelon’s $8 billion hostile takeover bid for NRG, and the $26 billion management buyout of Dell, Inc.  He also advises individuals, boards of directors, and management teams on issues of dealmaking and corporate governance.  Over his two decades on the Harvard faculty, Professor Subramanian has been involved as an advisor or expert witness in deals or situations worth over $150 billion in total value.  He is the Chairman of the Board of LKQ Corporation (NASDAQ: LKQ), a Fortune 500 company in the automotive sector; and an Advisory Board member at Orthogonal Capital, a hedge fund based in New York City.

Professor Subramanian holds degrees in Law, Economics, and Business from Harvard University.