Group focuses on preparing for transactional work
-By Lori Craig
Second-year students Mikhail Brandon and Justin Goldberg got to talking after their Business Organizations class last semester. They marveled at the resources available to law students with an eye on working with the business world, but didn’t see a student organization that tied them all together.
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| Mikhail Brandon '13 and Justin Goldberg '13 |
“With all the resources at USC Law, like the J.D./M.B.A. and the Business Law Certificate, it seemed like there was a lot of substance, but the students weren’t being really active about it,” said Brandon, who worked in an entertainment law firm last summer and wants to focus on corporate transactional work for emerging companies. “We want people to have a sense of what they can do with a law degree, where they can take it. At the law school, there are business law resources and classes and faculty, but we wanted to create one central place to find all of it.”
They decided to form the USC Business Law Society to provide guidance to students who are interested in transactional law. After generating the idea last November, they set about making the BLS as effective and useful an organization as possible, meeting with Dean Robert K. Rasmussen and all of the law school’s faculty business experts, including Profs. Michael Chasalow, Ehud Kamar, Edward Kleinbard and Jack Lerner, and Lecturers Donald Scotten and Vered Yackovee, among others. They found enthusiastic support and recruited Prof. Scotten to serve as the society’s advisor.
In January, they introduced the BLS to the law school student body. The pair distributed an email announcing the creation of the BLS while also publicizing its first event — featuring four top-notch technology attorneys — and discussing the results of a business lawyer survey they conducted.
“We wanted to be really assertive and clear about what our intentions were, that we’re serious about our organization,” said Goldberg, who worked at NBC Universal last summer and next summer will be an associate in the financial services group at Dechert LLP.
The survey, sent to alumni and other business law practitioners in firms of all sizes identified by the Career Services Office, was focused on what USC Law students should be doing in law school to succeed in the field. Questions asked about courses to take, organizations to join and mentors to seek.
The BLS’s inaugural event, “Tech IPOs from start to finish,” was held Feb. 21 and featured attorneys involved in the Groupon, LinkedIn and DTS Entertainment IPOs. Goldberg, who is taking a course at the USC Marshall School of Business, spread the word there about the event, which was highly attended by both law and business students.
“We wanted to get great speakers and have it be as informative as possible,” Goldberg said. (Click here to read more about the event.)
Receiving an excited response from their peers, Brandon and Goldberg brought in another five student representatives: Yue Guo LL.M. ’12, Melissa Boey ’13, Jennifer Cohen ’14, Dimitry Lensky ’14 and Juan Olivares ’14.
For now, the group is mostly focused on its biweekly BLS newsletter, which offers brief reflections on current business and law news, and planning its next event. As far as future plans, Brandon and Goldberg have floated the idea of starting a business law journal for students interested in researching transaction-related topics, and partnering with their business school peers.
“We have such a great resource in having a top business school right next door,” Goldberg said. “USC Marshall students are some great contacts to have going forward as well.”
To contact the organization or to sign up for its newsletters, click here.
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