Dechert Partners With Wharton School for Associate-Level Business Training Program

Law school is a great place to teach budding lawyers about legal concepts, how to be analytical and how to use logic, but it is lacking when it comes to relationship-building insight and business education, industry experts say.

Seeing the demand to offer younger attorneys instruction on those aspects of the legal business that aren’t part of a law school curriculum was a key driver behind a business program partnership between Dechert and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Fifty midlevel associates recently completed a three-day, intensive learning experience in which Wharton professors taught program participants about clients’ businesses in order to better prepare them for client representation.

The program, which involved on-site classroom lectures and interactive exercises at Wharton’s Philadelphia campus, enabled associates to learn how to deepen client relationships and anticipate risks associated with the respective client businesses.

“It really underscores our commitment to bridging the gap between legal expertise on the one hand and business acumen on the other, to continue to build out a very client-focused practice, and our associates are critical to that effort,” said Dechert co-chair Mark Thierfelder.

The legal landscape continues to evolve and attorney roles are expanding beyond that of the traditional legal counselor, Thierfelder said.

“You also have to be a strategic business adviser and by investing in our young, up-and-coming talent, we’re future-proofing the firm effectively to help our clients see around corners, stay one step ahead of regulatory changes, and anticipate making shifts in the fundamental aspects of their underlying businesses,” he said.

Program participants included 35 transactions attorneys who work in practice areas such as corporate and securities, financial services and investment management, tax and executive compensation and financial restructuring; and 15 litigation attorneys who work in securities, intellectual property, product liability and mass tort.

Participants came in from Boston, London, Los Angeles, Luxemburg, New York, Paris, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C.

Dechert said the idea behind the program, which was in its inaugural year this summer, is to help associates better understand their clients’ businesses so they can provide tailored and strategic solutions in an era where general counsels are often tasked with a greater workload.

“While law school prepares lawyers to think analytically and build strong arguments, it’s not business school,” Thierfelder said. “Our vision for this program is to help our lawyers better understand our clients’ businesses and become more strategic advisers.”

The primary reason Dechert sent both transactional attorneys and litigators to the program, he said, is that understanding clients’ businesses will require both the ability of associates to counsel those clients and also deal with any litigation that arises in the course of said representation.

Dechert received “enormously positive feedback” from associates who participated in the business training program, Thierfelder said. The associates were “quite laudatory” about the program and about the fact that they were selected by the firm to participate. And a Dechert spokesperson said the firm plans on exploring the prospect of repeating the program in future years.

“Dechert lawyers have outstanding legal skills, but legal issues rarely exist in a vacuum,” Emilie Feldman, the program’s academic director and a professor of management at Wharton, said in written responses to questions. “Understanding the client’s business operations, strategy, and market environment allows attorneys to provide more practical and tailored advice. This training better enables lawyers to offer legal solutions that also align with business needs.”

The associates were honored that Dechert was “investing in them, both in their careers at Dechert, but also just in their personal professional development as strategic advisers,” Thierfelder said.

Alex Andrews, an associate in Dechert’s global finance group who primarily handles work related to mortgage loan financing and structured finance agreements, said participation in the program was well worth the time investment.

When he initially learned about the program, Andrews said he was “captivated by the opportunity to learn from preeminent instructors in the fields of finance and private equity and management and marketing and global business trends.”

Since attending the program, Andrews said he already feels “better trained to more efficiently and effectively counsel our clients.”

“I have a more nuanced understanding of the financial goals, market pressures and competitive landscape that drive business-level decision-making,” he said. “That has been integral and enables me to bridge the communications gap between the legal and business world, which is incredibly important for all lawyers, but also associates at our level who have more direct contact with clients.”

Dechert initially considered other universities to host the program, but decided on Wharton, located just blocks from the firm’s Philadelphia office, because of its strong business focus.

“We’ve been incredibly pleased by what they put into it and the program they put together with our partners working with them hand-in-hand to design the curriculum and the subject matter,” Thierfelder said.

Dechert is not the first law firm to offer this type of business program for young associates.

Milbank first partnered with Harvard Business School to provide training to midlevel associates more than a decade ago, and Weil, Gotshal & Manges launched a similar tie-up with Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business roughly five years ago. Sidley Austin has also offered midlevel associates the opportunity to take MBA-level business courses at top universities to build up business acumen.