Educating Lawyers: Better Counsel and Better Managers of the Corporate Legal Framework

Hosted by the Law School, University of South Australia.

The global financial crisis continues to dominate world headlines and to drive rapid and wide ranging reform in corporate and securities law. Many of these reforms are designed to address the management of systemic risk and to curb executive excess. To a degree, they reflect a shortfall in previous reform intended to strengthen corporate governance.

Simultaneously, business worldwide is preparing to adjust to a carbon constrained future. Carbon pollution reduction schemes and carbon trading will collaterally bear upon corporate management, corporate finance, and corporate insolvency.

Driven by financial volatility and climate change, the current reform agenda has significant implications for the practice of corporate counsel, compliance officers, regulators and law firms, and, in turn, for legal education and research. Legal professionals are both agents involved in previous failures and empowered as agents for change. That position therefore imposes responsibility upon corporate law educators to ensure that their students have the necessary legal, social and ethical understanding required to learn from the past and respond to future challenges.