Why business schools need to rethink how they teach law

Consider what happens when a professor trained at a law faculty walks into an MBA classroom for the first time. She quickly discovers that her experience and pedagogical approach are of little use. Business students are not preparing for litigation. They need legal knowledge to make better business decisions, avoid preventable risks, and understand how legal frameworks can shape corporate strategy. Yet nobody offers structured training to help law professors make this shift. This is a silent truth in most business schools, and students know it.

The stakes have never been higher. We live in an era of lawfare: the deliberate weaponisation of legal systems to achieve political or commercial objectives beyond the law’s original purpose. Trade restrictions, sanctions, data localisation requirements and conflicting compliance standards all fragment global value chains. As Columbia Law professor Tim Wu has argued, the strategic use of litigation and regulation to disadvantage competitors or suppress dissent has become a defining feature of modern global competition. In this environment, legal ignorance is not merely inconvenient, it is a strategic liability. Managers who cannot read a contract, assess regulatory risk or recognise when the law is being used against them are dangerously exposed.

Two roles, two profiles

Law professors in business schools and those in law faculties may share the same degrees, but they teach radically different audiences with different needs and expectations. In law schools, teaching is retrospective and adversarial. Students learn to analyse cases, master doctrine and argue positions, with most of the curriculum aimed at preparing them for court.

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In business schools, teaching must be forward-looking and proactive, focused on legal risk management and on using the legal system as a source of competitive advantage. Students need to recognise legal issues early, understand when to seek expert advice, and integrate legal thinking into strategy, finance and operations. They do not need procedural law; they need practical tools for managing risk, designing contracts to achieve strategic goals and navigating regulatory complexity. As management professor Constance Bagley has shown, companies that use the law proactively do not just avoid problems, they create genuine value. Legal literacy is not optional; it’s a core managerial capability.

The business-law training gap

Despite this strategic imperative, law professors who move into business education have no formal pathway to guide their preparation. This is a striking gap. Colleagues in strategy, finance or organisational behaviour can draw on rich pedagogical traditions: teaching notes, business case catalogues, faculty development programmes and journals dedicated to management education. A law professor arrives with none of that. However accomplished as a scholar, they must figure out, largely alone, how to translate legal knowledge into something useful for future managers, and most never receive any guidance on how to do so.

An executive MBA may fill those gaps, but this should not be necessary. My own EMBA experience was revealing: most lawyers have little practical understanding of how a company functions day to day, how operations, finance, marketing and product teams work, or what kinds of legal insight these functions need. Understanding how organisations work is a precondition for teaching law to future managers.

The US has the Academy of Legal Studies in Business (ALSB), a dedicated institution for the teaching of law in business and management schools. It publishes two influential journals, the American Business Law Journal and the Journal of Legal Studies Education, and provides a scholarly community and shared knowledge base for this distinct field. However, the ALSB primarily serves US-based faculty and does not address the specific challenges facing European law professors, who operate across different institutional contexts, legal systems and pedagogical traditions.

Europe lacks an equivalent. France’s Association Française Droit et Management is a noteworthy effort, but it operates at national scale. What is needed is a continent-wide institution that reflects EU values and the distinctive character of European legal systems, one that treats teaching law in business schools as a specialised academic calling, not an afterthought.

Law as a strategic resource

A growing body of scholarship, spanning the Nordic proactive law tradition, French work in law and management, and the American legal strategy literature, converges on a single insight: legal expertise is a strategic resource, not a support function.

These perspectives share a common argument. Legal knowledge does far more than ensure compliance. It shapes value creation, risk allocation, governance quality and the stability of business relationships. Firms that understand and integrate legal capabilities outperform those that treat law as an ex-post constraint. 

For teaching, this view has concrete implications. It means training students to recognise legal issues early, use legal tools proactively, and understand how contractual and regulatory choices shape business outcomes. It requires moving beyond doctrinal exposition towards case-based analysis, decision-making exercises, and simulations that reflect the strategic role of legal expertise in real organisations. If legal capability is a strategic asset, legal education must train future managers to use it strategically.

What needs to happen

The case for a European association of law professors in business schools, with its own research agenda, training programmes and journal, is now compelling. Business school deans and academic directors have a role to play here, too. Hiring law professors is not enough. Providing the conditions in which law professors can develop as teachers of managers, not just as legal scholars, is what will make the difference for students.

The conversation needs to start somewhere. It may as well start here.

Maximiliano Marzetti is an associate professor of law in the department of international negotiation and conflict management at IESEG School of Management, France.

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