Preface

• Author: Bert Spector
• Profession: Professor of Strategy at Northeastern University
• Pages: 9-11

Preface ix

PREFACE

ABA Fundamentals: Understanding Your Business Clients is a book about

business for lawyers; those who are currently working in-house and in

various business-related practices, as well a s those who are considering the

practice of business law. It is not a text on business law. Those texts are

plentiful and readily available. Instead, this is a guided tour through the

world of your current or potential clients, and the narrative is offered from

a business perspective rather than a legal one.

Let me explain what I mean. Business law texts a re typically organized

around legal concepts: contracts, torts, property law, and so forth. That

makes perfect sense as a way to sort th rough the many legal issues faced by

in-house and outside counsel. It is not, however, how corporate executives

approach their own world. To help your interactions with those current

and potential future clients, Understanding Your Business Clients is

organized around concepts and issues that arise i n the day-to-day activities

of managers: finance, strateg y, huma n resources, marketing, and so forth.

There are case examples presented in Und erst andi ng Your B usin ess

Clients, but not the kind typically offered in legal texts. Rather than

court cases, I’ve offered illustrations from the world of business: quarterly

finan cial reports from IBM, corporate str ucture at Disney, customer