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The primary focus of conventional business law courses such as contracts, business associations, etc. is on what happens when agreements fall apart because of incompleteness and/or opportunistic behavior. As a consequence law students are very adept at structuring agreements and advising clients of their rights and duties. While these courses are crucially important to becoming a successful business lawyer they rarely address a fundamental question: Why conduct these transactions in the first place? For example, business law courses provides an excellent foundation for understanding how a corporation should structure an agreement to acquire another firm, however these classes are almost always silent on why the corporation would want to acquire the target firm in the first place. Business Strategy for Lawyers is about understanding why firms make the right (and sometimes the wrong) strategic decisions. Course content and structure: This class will be divided into three parts: competitive strategy, internal organizational strategy, and applications. Competitive strategy looks at how the characteristics of markets and the behavior of competitors influence a firm?s strategic decisions. Internal organizational strategy looks at how firms decide on issues such as vertical boundaries, incentive systems, and promotion systems. Finally the applications section looks at issues such as innovation and law firm strategy. This course will be a mix of business cases (distinct from legal cases because they are all consistently well written), lectures, and in class experiments. Prerequisites: None. All relevant concepts will be developed in the class. Though some economics will be used, it will all be presented in an intuitive, non-mathematical manner. Assignments and Grading: Group Project (50%) Class Participation (30%) Final (20%): The final will ask you to analyze a business strategy case. If you pay attention and participate in class you shouldn't need to spend an enormous amount of time studying for the final exam during the exam period.