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For students interested in business law, the most exciting upcoming event is the Corporate Law Institute, hosted by Tulane Law School and happening today and tomorrow at the Roosevelt Hotel in downtown New Orleans. It's like attending an "Oscars for Lawyers" ceremony, even if the attire lacks the traditional glamour. Coming from all over the United States, the heads of corporate practice in law firms, managing directors of investment banks, Delaware Chief Justice and Vice Chancellors and SEC officials discuss what has happened in the past year in the transactional world in front of an audience full of corporate practitioners and securities litigators. It's fine if the students do not understand everything that is being said.  The lawyers sitting next to them are having a hard time following the debate as well.  

The CDO set up several informational interview sessions for our students. Several speakers have agreed to meet with small groups of students to answer career related questions. We have done this for many years, and if past sessions are any indication, our students will be talking to corporate celebrities featured on the Charlie Rose Show, CNN and Squawk Box.  

The sessions will feature Chris Young (Managing Director & Head of Contested Situations, Credit Suisse), Roy J. Katzovicz  (General Counsel for Pershing Square Capital Management hedge fund), Tom Cronin & Jon Einsidler (Partners, Phoenix Advisory Partners), Janet L. Kelly (Senior Vice President & General Counsel, ConocoPhillips), and Robert Kindler (Vice Chairman, Global Head of Mergers & Acquisitions, Morgan Stanley).

We are fortunate to be able to facilitate networking opportunities like these for our Tulane Law students, and we know they will make us proud as always by attending the event en masse and asking intelligent, thoughtful questions.  Another awesome networking event happening at Tulane! We love the Spring! 

Sarka Cerna-Fagan, Assistant Dean
Katie O’Leary, Director
Career Development Office 

 

I attended Admiralty Law Institute for the first day of the three-day conference yesterday.  This year's topic, "Maritime Catastrophes: Marine Investigation & Mass Claims Practice" features a host of wonderful programs and continues through this Friday.  I was able to be there for the welcoming remarks by Dean Meyer and Bob Acomb, one of our wonderful maritime adjunct professors, the address by Patrick Bonner, current President of the Maritime Law Association, and the first panel on Developments in Cargo Law.  I was very interested to see one speaker in particular during the Cargo Law panel, Ms. Denise Krepp, Chief Counsel at the US Department of Transportation, Maritime Administration (MARAD).  Ms. Krepp came to Tulane Law last semester to speak to the Maritime Law Society, and during her visit she met with Dean Meyer as well as Amanda Moeller, the government counselor at the CDO. From those meetings, Ms. Krepp graciously offered to accept resumes from Tulane students for summer internships with MARAD, and along with Michaela Noble (a staff attorney at MARAD and a Tulane Law alumna), hired two of our Tulane first-year students for this summer.  I was looking forward to simply saying hello to Denise and Michaela and welcoming them to Tulane, but to my surprise, Denise took the opportunity during her speech to mention the interns and express her excitement about her incoming Tulane law clerks.  She also invited other students attending the conference to speak to her about careers at MARAD.  What a great opportunity to promote Tulane students to the other practitioners at the conference!

I was also pleased to see so many of the practitioners flipping through the resume books that I made featuring resumes from Tulane maritime students. A book went in the conference bag of every attendee at ALI, and I saw many of the bright blue resume books floating around the conference yesterday.  I was also happy to see student representatives of both the Tulane Law Review and Maritime Law Journal handing out the latest journal volumes at ALI.  There was also a wonderful networking reception at the New Orleans Board of Trade last night, and many students took my advice to attend the event (free of charge for students) and meet some of the most well-known maritime practitioners in the world. 

So far, the Admiralty Law Institute is going very well. I'm sure our maritime professors, Martin Davies and Bob Force, must be very pleased.  I'm excited to see what today brings at ALI.

If it's March in an odd-numbered year, it means that one can hardly walk 10 feet on this campus without bumping into a maritime lawyer.  Every other March, the Admiralty Law Institute holds its bi-annual mega-meeting, this being the 23rd Admiralty Law Institute. The (quite timely) topic this year is Maritime Catastrophes and Reponses.  A unique aspect of this professional meeting is that it's not held downtown in a series of hotel ballrooms--by design, it is held on the Tulane campus, which means that students can easily attend the sessions and talk with some of the most prominent maritime lawyers on the planet.  Naturally, our Career Development Office uses this opportunity to set up interviews for our students, and the Maritime Law Center makes sure that a number of the attendees set aside time to meet with interested students in the Maritime Law Society.

Next week, theTulane Corporate Law Institute meets in New Orleans.  Through a strange arithmetic coincidence, this is also the 23rd event--although the Corporate Law Institute has taken place for only half as long as the Admiralty Law Institute, it meets in New Orleans every year. While this Tulane Law School-sponsored conference will be taking place downtown, it is also open to students.  Again, our Career Development Office will set up a number of opportunities for students to meet with some of the most brilliant minds in corporate and securities law.  This conference has been touted by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other corporate law journals and bulletins as THE conference for M&A attorneys. 

Also convening late next week is the 16th Annual Environmental Law Summit.  This is a student-run conference taking place in Weinmann Hall, and the topic this year is Energy.  There will be two full days of presentations and panel discussions, two keynote addresses, and the conference concludes with a private tour of Manchac wetlands, led by environmental scientists.

Today, Weinmann Hall is filled with prospective law students as we welcome admitted students here for our first (of the season) visiting day for admitted students.  These events are always exciting, as we have the opportunity to meet people we've only come to know through their application materials and our faculty and current students interact with our visitors and express their own enthusiasm for Tulane.  It doesn't hurt that the weather is about as beautiful as one can imagine.

I was asked today what a typical day is like for a student, and although I talked about going to class and preparing for class, I also highlighted the almost incalculable opportunities our students have to attend extraordinarily interesting programs with great speakers, compelling topics, and the opportunity to sit next to someone who might be helpful in one's job search.

Today, for example, in addition to our program for admitted students, there's a Tax Policy Roundtable taking place in the classroom across the hall from my office.  Tax scholars from around the country are in that room, reacting to each other's ideas, along with any of our students who are interested.  Tomorrow, our own Human Rights Law Society is hosting a day-long program on "Heath as a Human Right," with sessions on constitutional underpinnings, intellectual property aspects of health care, and practical aspects of ensuring access.  Especially impressive is the fact that this program is entirely student developed and executed.  I just saw an announcement from our Sports Law program, publicizing an Athletic Director Roundtable Discussion open to our entire community.  Athletic directors from three universities will discuss running a collegiate athletic program, including dealing with compliance and with agents.  Our Law Women group is presenting a two-part Women's History Speaker Series.  Our Disability & Health Law Society has been particularly active this year in developing programs on a variety of topics, finding speakers and even arranging for CLE credit (which ensures that practicing lawyers will attend, which leads to the likelihood that students will  interact with them).  Coming up next week is a program on special-needs trusts, and this is probably the 5th substantive program this group of students has arranged this semester.

I am continually impressed by the breadth of topics and the initiative shown by our students.

Everybody from outside of New Orleans thinks Mardi Gras is just one day, next week.  But in real life, here in New Orleans, it's been going on for what seems like the last two weeks.  You can't go anywhere without being fed a piece of king cake, or seeing people wearing beads from last night's parade, or getting ready to go to today's parades.

Despite all of this, however, life does go on at the Law School.  Classes are in session, students are attending, the first-year students just turned in their appellate briefs, there was a judicial clerkship information program last night, and virtually the entire faculty has participated in academic advising meetings almost every day for the past two weeks.  These are something new here--teams of faculty members in difference academic and practice areas have met with interested students to talk about their own backgrounds and to discuss what courses students should consider taking as electives if they're interested in a particular area.  The goal is really to encourage students to come and talk with faculty members individually after being introduced to them in a group setting.

Professor Feldman just told me that he's just agreed to serve as the on-air legal analyst for the NFL Network, coivering the collective bargaining negotiations.  Anyone following the NFL/Players' Association situation cannot have missed the fact that Gabe Feldman is the leading expert quoted in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. 

And to prove that we're not just a sports law school, coming up after the break are the annual Deutsch Lecture on public international law and the Eason-Weinmann Center's Symposium on "The European Union 20 Years After Maastricht - Transatlantic Perspectives."  This year's Deutsch lecturer is Peter Sand, one of the world's leading environmental legal experts.  The Eason-Weinmann conference will bring together experts from both sides of the Atlantic to discuss issues of transatlantic trade, currency and the financial crisis, models of multileveled governance, and the role of the European Union as a player in a multi-polar world.