Phone: 734 647-4043
Fax:
Email: dougkahn@umich.edu
Home Page:
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Summary Description:

The course is a seminar titled, "Tax Planning for Business Transactions." In addition to myself, the teachers include Terry Perris, a senior partner at a large Cleveland firm, and Amir Chenchinski, an S.JD candidate. There are 20 students who are divided into 5 teams of 4 students. We solicit from 4 senior partners at large New York and Cleveland law firms the submission of a problem that they handled that required cutting edge solutions. Three classes are devoted to each problem. At the first class, the students are given the facts and the clients' goals, but they may not receive all of the facts they need. The problem and the relevant basic legal issues are discussed. The students can e-mail questions to the instructors, including requests for specific additional facts. The responses, which can be lengthy, are circulated to the entire class. At the second class, there is more extensive discussion of the relevant legal issues and the students participate in that discussion. The student teams e-mail the instructors their solutions to the problems several days before the third meeting. At the third meeting, the lawyer who submitted the problem attends and discusses the students' solutions, and explains the solution thet the lawyer adopted. The lawyer sometimes attends the second class meeting as well.

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Program History:

This seminar was first offered in the Winter term of 2003. In that seminar, there were 10 students plus one graduate student who audited it and participated in writing solutions. All of those students have graduated, and one is now an instructor in the current seminar. There are 20 students in the current seminar, which is the second time this course has been offered. There was a waiting list of 8 students who sought to take the seminar.

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Confidential Items: None

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Expanded Program Description (Optional):

One of the goals of this program is to give students the opportunity to apply the legal priniples they have learned in tax and other courses to the resolution of a complex problem. This requires the students to anticipate problems that might arise in the future as well as those that already are present. There are few courses in law schools that are transactionally oriented, and yet that is a major part of the work of most lawyers. The transactional focus of this seminar is one of its benfits. Another goal is to expose students to the workings of a sophisticated commercial practice and to experience first-hand how signifiant a role creativity plays in the practice of law at a high level. It is hoped that the students not only will learn much about the techniques of transactional work, and of the substantive legal issues that they will have to research and apply, but also will see that law practice can be an exciting and intellectually rich profession.

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Supporting Materials:

(1) Two problems that used in the seminar this term (pdf file)

(2) a summary of the student evaluations of the first offering of this seminar (pdf file)