Scott Westfahl, a professor at Harvard Law School and the director of its executive education program, will be busy the next few weeks. On April 30, doors opened for his school's one-week, $15,000 price-tagged program offering lawyers the chance to study law firm management at Harvard. In mid-May the doors will open again for a program targeting in-house lawyers. Westfahl answered ALM's questions about the students, goals and results of the programs, Leadership in Law Firms and Leadership in Corporate Counsel, which are now in their tenth year.

Q: Has the curriculum for these sessions changed very much over the years?

Scott Westfahl: Our program originated out of work done at Harvard Business School, where our colleagues began studying professional services firms some 15-20 years ago. With our deep understanding of the global legal profession and our specific focus on lawyers and legal organizations, we have now diverged significantly from their more general [Harvard Business School] HBS curriculum, which is more suited for accounting, financial, consulting and engineering firms. In the past five years, for example, among other things we have developed new cases and research around why law firms fail, how sponsorship works at a law firm, what drives collaboration in law firms and how to achieve more collaboration, how innovation and design thinking can be used to accelerate change in a legal organization, how law firms can address tricky issues like partner compensation, etc. For our Leadership in Corporate Counsel program we continue to develop new cases and research around topics such as crisis management, cybersecurity, having difficult conversations with boards and the expanding role of the global general counsel, for example.