Andrew Kaufman

Andrew Kaufman brings more than 40 years of experience in private practice and more than a decade of experience teaching transactional courses and practice skills. He has mentored transactional law students at several leading law schools including Vanderbilt University Law School, UCLA School of Law, and the University of Southern California Gould School of Law.

From a transactional lawyer’s perspective, Kaufman teaches courses that address business associations, commercial law including secured transactions, leveraged buyouts, mergers and acquisitions, risk management and compliance, syndicated loan transactions and other current issues in transactional practice. When feasible, Kaufman combines the doctrinal elements of his subject matter with the experiential. He uses hypotheticals based on actual transactions to help students understand the inherent and external risks involved, while also developing lawyering skills to mitigate those risks.

Kaufman was a long-time partner with Kirkland & Ellis LLP handling matters primarily from their Chicago and New York offices. He founded and, for many years, supervised the firm’s Debt Finance Group and chaired the firm’s Opinions Committee. Now of counsel to the firm, Kaufman continues to participate in its professional training programs and to advise on internal risk management matters and client transactions.

At Vanderbilt, Kaufman served as an adjunct professor from 2005-2009. In 2009, he was appointed their first professor of the practice of law for the Law and Business Program, a position he held for next three years. He spent the 2012-13 academic year at UCLA, where he served as professor from practice and the initial executive director of UCLA’s Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy. He began offering his transactional weekend short courses at the USC Gould School of Law in 2008, and he continues to present them regularly at both Vanderbilt and USC.

FACULTY IN THE NEWS

The Washington Post
December 2, 2019
Re: Jonathan Handel

Jonathan Handel was quoted on Pete Davidson's nondisclosure agreement for attending his comedy shows, barring the audience from speaking about his shows. Handel mentioned that successfully suing a random fan for $1 million would be nearly impossible. “The optics of going to court and suing one of your fans is really pretty ugly,” Handel said. “It would be foolish to do that.”

RECENT SCHOLARSHIP

Scott Altman
October, 2019

"Are Boycotts, Shunning, and Shaming Corrupt?” Legal Theory Workshop, University of Virginia Law School, Charlottesville, VA.

Gregory Keating
October, 2019

Gregory Keating’s paper, “Is Tort Law ‘Private’?” was reviewed by Ellen Bublick as a significant work of scholarship relating to Tort Law in JOTWELL: The Journal of Things We Like (Lots), on October 15, 2019.

Dan Simon
October, 2019

“Confessions True and False,” Korean Society for Criminal Law, Yonsei University Law School, Seoul, South Korea.