Scott Westfahl

Harvard spent $16.4 million on advertising in 2016, tax filings show—enough to book three 30-second primetime spots on Fox’s broadcast of Super Bowl LII. But the chances of Harvard actually purchasing such an advertisement are low. Walking around Harvard Square and the Greater Boston area, prospective students and tourists are hard pressed to find the typical trappings of such a sizeable budget—billboards branded with the University’s crest or posters emblazoned in crimson. In many ways, the Harvard name sells itself, according to Law School Director of Executive Education Scott A. Westfahl. Even the University’s newer revenue-generating programs, including executive education and the summer school, benefit from the brand. “I think the hardest part of my job is knowing that the Harvard brand is incredibly powerful,” Westfahl said. “We have to exceed expectations that are already really, really high.”

The corporate legal services industry is in need of massive change to address fundamental shortcomings, according to panelists at Wednesday’s “Magna Carta for the Corporate Legal Services Industry” session at the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium’s (CLOC) annual institute in Las Vegas. But what exactly are the changes needed and who can really drive them?...Billing is another area in legal that is often cited as in need of revision because while there’s been a push for alternative fee arrangements in recent years, it’s still often the case that top firms charge high hourly rates and legal departments pay them...This is where law schools come in, according to Scott Westfahl, a professor at Harvard Law School and the director of its executive education program. “Legal education, the cost is incredibly high and the reason graduates are going into large law firms and need to be paid $180,000 is so that they can start paying that back,” he said.

Scott Westfahl, a professor at Harvard Law School and the director of its executive education program, will be busy the next few weeks. On April 30, doors opened for his school's one-week, $15,000 price-tagged program offering lawyers the chance to study law firm management at Harvard. In mid-May the doors will open again for a program targeting in-house lawyers. Westfahl answered ALM's questions about the students, goals and results of the programs, Leadership in Law Firms and Leadership in Corporate Counsel, which are now in their tenth year.

...The top law firms are making fewer and fewer partners, making it trickier for young lawyers to make it to the top. At the same time, there has been a big shift in the legal profession over the past decade, in which associates no longer see partnership at the firm where they started as the ultimate goal...It is every lawyer’s dream: a paid week off work with no access to a smartphone, learning from top professors at Harvard Law School...Best of all — client work is not allowed to get in the way, says Professor Scott Westfahl, the director of executive education at Harvard Law School, who runs the programme...“It’s just an extraordinary investment, the idea that you’re taking associates offline, letting them come together for a week of learning every year for four years — and putting them together with their peers from other offices lets them build relationships that will last for many years,” says Professor Westfahl.

The thought of returning to law school just a few years after graduation would fill many young lawyers with dread. But for midlevel associates Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, a unique training program at Harvard Law School has become a prized rite of passage...The Milbank@Harvard program is unique in its focus on teaching law firm associates applied business skills, said Scott Westfahl, faculty director of executive education and professor of practice at Harvard Law School. “I don’t know of another program like this,” Westfahl said. It is administered in conjunction with the Harvard Law School Executive Education Program, which was founded by Professors David Wilkins and Ashish Nanda about eight years ago.

While a student at Harvard Law School, Eva Hibnick took business and marketing electives at Harvard Business School and MIT. However, it wasn’t until a couple of years later, when she left a big law firm to join a startup, that she realized how important personal branding, networking and marketing were...[Silverstein] says she and her friend Heidi Gardner, (an assistant professor who just shifted over from Harvard Business School to Harvard Law School and teaches law firm economics, strategy, marketing and collaboration), are co-authoring the first textbook on law firm business management because “Heidi and I are convinced (these classes) will be part of every law school program in the near future.”...n addition to transitioning Gardner over to the law school, Harvard Law has made other advancements in this area recently and has made “a giant leap from where Harvard Law School was 20 years ago,” says Scott Westfahl, a professor of practice who joined Harvard Law just over a year ago.