On Friday, I received my last two Fall Semester grades. M&A was one. Venture Capital, which I’ll post on tomorrow, was the other.
- Getting into the Class. No problems here. Like all of my other transactional law courses this semester, there were loads of LLMs registered.
- Deliverables. None other than the final exam, which was a 24 hour take-home. Doesn’t sound too bad, right? The catch was that the professor expected we would work through the entire 24 hours to do well on the exam. I followed his advice and the resulting grade was as promised . . . but those 24 hours were pretty painful.
- Reading Assignments. Long and frequent. The professor was honest and upfront about the fact that the casebook was subpar. Nonetheless, he assigned out-of-this world quantities of reading (given the fact that M&A is a 2 credit hour class). I recommend the Nutshell.
- The Professor. He had a lot of war stories from his many years in practice. I enjoyed that but, from my point of view, the war stories sometimes obscured the substantive material. The man commutes from Houston to teach the class each week, which we’ve gotta appreciate, and he was always impeccably dressed (seriously, dressed to the nines). He brought in a colleague to serve as a guest lecturer on tax topics. The guest lecturer provided us with a package of his firm’s training materials on M&A tax topics that was hugely helpful to me when I studied for my corporate tax exam.
Read the full article: Final Thoughts: Mergers & Acquisitions