The ACLB Program requires the successful completion of 15 credit hours of graduate business study, nine of which are taken in a summer session in the Stern School. The summer term is dedicated to foundational courses which will prepare law students for business law courses taken in the fall (such as corporations or securities regulation) as well as more advanced topics. During the remaining part of their academic program in the Law School, ACLB students will take six (6) additional credit hours of courses in the Stern School, cross-listed with the Stern School or, with permission, Law School courses that focus on business or finance. Thus, in total, ACLB students will take 15 credit hours of academic work before they are awarded the certificate.
Overview of Courses*
The summer classes are given at the Stern School during a six-week session. Each course requires approximately 37 academic hours of instruction. A short description of the core summer classes follows:
Financial Accounting and Reporting introduces students to accounting reports which are an important means of communication with investors. This course focuses on the development, analysis, and use of these reports. It provides an understanding of what these reports contain, what assumptions and concepts accountants use to prepare them, and why they use those assumptions and concepts. The course uses simple examples to provide students with a clear understanding of accounting concepts. It stresses the ability to apply these concepts to real world cases, which by their very nature are complex and ambiguous. In addition to text-oriented materials, the classes also include cases so that students can discuss applications of basic concepts, actual financial reports, and articles from newspapers. In addition to traditional introductory topics other topics may include mergers and acquisitions, purchase and pooling, free cash flow, and financial statement analysis.
Statistics and Data Analysis provides a survey of quantitative techniques applicable to decision making, with special regard to their roles in legal issues. Topics will include introduction to probability, statistical distributions (including binomial, Poisson, normal), statistical inference (estimation, prediction, and hypothesis tests), multivariate linear regression, correlation analysis, and statistical sampling. Examples will be drawn from problems from legal proceedings.
Foundations of Corporate Finance analyzes the most significant financial decisions facing corporate managers. The major topics include investment valuation (capital budgeting), capital structure and dividend policy, and mergers and acquisitions. There will be emphasis on both developing the tools and mindset of the financial practitioner as well as examining specific applications in the form of examples and several case discussions.
During the Fall and Spring semesters in conjunction with their NYU Law courses, ACLB students take six credit hours of electives from a broad range of courses normally offered in the Stern curriculum, cross-listed with Stern and the Law School, or business-focused courses offered at the Law School.
*If you have already taken one of the core summer courses or have a strong background in the topics covered, it may be possible for you to place out of a core course and replace it with a higher level business course offered at Stern over the summer.
Faculty
The faculty for the Certificate Program are drawn from senior faculty members from Stern:
Professor Alex Dontoh is a Professor of Accounting at the Stern School of Business, New York University. He is the Deputy Chair of the Department of Accounting. Professor Dontoh holds a Ph.D. from New York University, an M.B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and a B.Sc. in Business administration from the University of Ghana.
Clinical Professor Anthony Marciano joined the Stern School of Business as a Clinical Professor of Finance in August 2007. Marciano teaches corporate finance courses to MBA students and oversees the Michael Price Student Investment Fund, a student-run fund with a value of about $2 million. Prior to joining NYU Stern, Marciano taught courses on advanced corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions at MIT Sloan School of Management. From 1994 to 2006, he was a Clinical Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, where he taught MBA and Executive MBA courses. Marciano has been named to Businessweek’s list of outstanding faculty. Previously, he worked at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Drexel Burnham Lambert.
Adjunct Professor Cyrus Mohebbi manages a team in Morgan Stanley’s Global Wealth Management Group that develops quantitative models for pricing, originations, and risk management. Products include bank deposits, mortgages, portfolio, and tailor lending accounts, as well as a wide variety of fixed income and interest rate products such as corporate and municipal bonds, structured notes, and swaps. Mohebbi is also an adjunct professor at Columbia University and New York University teaching statistics, corporate finance, and structured finance. He holds an MBA in management and accounting from LaSalle University, an MS in business statistics from Temple University, an MA in marketing, and a PhD in statistics and postdoctoral in management from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.