Tell us about your experience in the Business Transactions Clinic.
I am a big believer in learning by doing, and I am convinced that the Business Transaction Clinic is one of the most career-relevant parts of the JD program.
One of my team’s two clients needed help setting up their business, with work encompassing everything from forming the corporation to drafting the bylaws and the stock purchase agreement. For our second client, the bulk of our time was dedicated to drafting commercial contracts. The client service component dovetailed perfectly with the seminar portion of the clinic, with the theoretical and the practical parts reinforcing each other and creating real learning synergies.
Throughout, we also greatly benefitted from Professor Naveen Thomas and Professor Jillian Schroder-Fenlons’s immediate, detailed, and actionable feedback (and the professors’ predilection for steering us towards drafting from scratch, even if it felt a bit painful at times).
What has been your favorite law school class so far?
Picking your favorite law school class has got to be similar to picking your favorite child. If forced to choose, I’d short-list Judge Arthur Gonzalez’s Basic Bankruptcy class and mega-cases seminar and Professor Chuck Nathan’s Anatomy of a Merger seminar. Both professors have reached the peak of their respective professions, presided over the most complex restructurings and facilitated the largest mergers and acquisitions (M&A) transactions, and both take a practical approach focused on how parties’ or clients’ objectives are actually accomplished in the real world. I’m also currently enjoying Special Situations: Distressed M&A taught by Robb Tretter and Jon Gill, a fantastic seminar that brings together multiple aspects of transactional law, from restructuring to corporate governance to capital markets and everything in between.
What is your favorite part of being a NYU Law student?
I think it’s the quality of tenured and adjunct faculty in regulatory and transactional law. You can walk from a lecture by a former SEC Commissioner to one taught by an incoming head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs to another led by the best young tax professor in the country. And the number of current and retired partners at top firms contributing their time to pass knowledge to the new generation of associates defies counting.
Favorite place to relax in New York City?
Bar Goto on the Lower East Side.
Posted on April 19, 2023