Beginning this fall, Fordham Law requires all 1L students to take a course aimed at bolstering their understanding of finance. It is the first law school to do so. The course, Quantitative Methods for Lawyers, will introduce Fordham Law students to basic financial concepts and general quantitative reasoning, skills that law firms and legal service providers deem integral to success in today’s legal marketplace.
Law school courses, including many in the first year, require some understanding of markets, cost-benefit analysis, and the time value of money. The Quantitative Methods course will expose students to these broad law-related finance issues, and in the long term, increase their ability to manage cases and transactions and strengthen their competence within firm management.
“Recognizing that quantitative reasoning is a critical component of every lawyer’s skill set, we created the Quantitative Methods for Lawyers course to introduce fundamental concepts and specialized vocabulary,” explained Professor Linda Sugin, who helped design the new course.
The course consists of six hours of instruction and covers the following topics:
• Supply and demand, markets, and externalities
• Cost-benefit analysis
• Probability and causation
• Expected value and the time value of money
• Financial statements
• Ethics and the role of the lawyer in financial decisions
Each hour will be taught by a different member of the Law School’s full-time faculty. A unifying problem will tie together all the modules. In this way, students will start the course by analyzing the events leading up to a tort case and follow through as the case proceeds, using quantitative reasoning at every stage.
Concurrent with the new Quantitative Methods course, incoming students will take Fordham Law’s existing foundational short course on Legal Process, which consists of an introduction to case analysis and the legal system.
