From Levi Strauss to UM Law As a Senior Marketing Manager at Levi Strauss & Company, UM Law Professor Michele DeStefano Beardslee spent her time trying to understand how people behaved, what motivated people to buy, and which strategies would get customers to purchase her company’s products. But as time went on, she realized she wasn’t that excited about selling jeans, so she turned to law school to focus on things that mattered to her — human behavior as it relates to principles and ethics. While at Harvard Law School, Beardslee wrote her first paper, in which she interviewed general counsels on multidisciplinary practices. That experience solidified her desire to become an academic because she was able to combine her business background with her legal education. “It was kismet,” she said. “I was able to put it all together. It’s really nice when your worlds collide.” DeStefano Beardslee joined UM Law in 2009 after serving as a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, where she was previously the Associate Research Director of the Program on the Legal Profession. DeStefano Beardslee has been conducting research on the intersection of law and business, particularly looking at how the intersection is reshaping the roles of inside and outside counsel. Her current research explores the organizational settings in which lawyers work, such as corporations, law schools, courts, and firms, and the doctrines and rules that regulate those settings. Her two most recent articles, which were just published in the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, study the intersection between law and public relations, specifically examining how corporate lawyers are managing legal public relations — the public relations surrounding legal controversies and legal issues.
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PROFESSOR MICHELE DESTEFANO BEARDSLEE Straddles the Worlds of Law and Business In addition to her research, DeStefano Beardslee teaches Civil Procedure and a course on the Legal Profession. She tries to engage her students in different ways, including using music in class to make a point, as well as using Clickers, a technological tool which allows instructors to ask questions and gather students’ responses during a lecture. DeStefano Beardslee is spearheading a new academic model for this spring, called LawWithoutWalls™ (LWOW). This course is a “collaborative, semi-virtual venture” designed to innovate legal education and practice that will include law professors, non-lawyer entrepreneurs, practitioners, and law school students from six different universities: Fordham Law, Harvard Law, Miami Law, New York Law School, Peking University, and University College London. Students will be paired up from different schools with academic and practitioner mentors, and assigned a topic that relates to the evolutionary changes within the legal profession. The students’ job will be to identify a problem in legal education or practice and create a Project of Worth that provides a creative solution to that problem. This project could be in many forms such as a new business model, or an innovation on an existing legal service. Additionally, once a week, students will attend virtual, realtime presentations and active learning sessions so students can be anywhere on their computer. “LWOW will end with a ‘conposium,’ which is more than a conference, more than a symposium, it’s virtual and real attendance; it involves students, academics and practitioners, with real time interaction,” said DeStefano Beardslee. At the “conposium” students will present their projects alongside academics, practitioners, entrepreneurs and other types of business people. Her biggest challenge as a new faculty member? Time. DeStefano Beardslee has three small children, she’s “addicted to working out” — she runs 25 to 30 miles a week — and she has just moved into a new home, close to the law school. “There are so many projects I want to work on, and so many people I want to connect with, but I don’t have enough time to do everything I want to do.” Having grown up in Miami, DeStefano Beardslee is more than comfortable being back in this city, after twenty years in the Northeast. “Miami is diverse and eclectic. It’s both beautiful and harsh at the same time, and I love that dichotomy. I feel like I fit here.”