Consulting the Experts

What do you get when you cross one of the world's best known law schools with a global management consulting firm? The answer, Harvard Law School (HLS) hopes, is an improved academic institution.

Over the course of this past spring, a team of consultants from McKinsey & Co. conducted a study of the premier law institution--currently placed second in the annual graduate school rankings by U.S. News & World Report--which has yet to be completed.

The McKinsey study, in particular, seeks to analyze the school's strengths and weaknesses both for students and faculty and will be used by HLS officials to make plans for long-term development.

Neither senior law school officials nor representatives from McKinsey were willing to comment on the price of the firm's consultation, but several sources estimate the figure to be anywhere between $800,000 and $ 1 million.

But some students feel that HLS, which already employs some of the nation's sharpest minds, is wasting its money by outsourcing its planning.

"A lot of students share the sentiment that the law school is spending close to $1 million to hire McKinsey to get what it could have gotten for free," says Hamilton Chan '95, a third-year law student.

More for Your Money

What will Harvard get for its money?

That's the question on the minds of many HLS students and even a few professors as they await McKinsey's preliminary report, due by the end of the summer.

The plan to hire consultants began as part of HLS's Strategic Planning Initiative (SPI), launched in the fall of 1998. SPI is charged with providing HLS with a vision for the future as it heads into the new millennium.

HLS Dean Robert C. Clark formally invited McKinsey after the idea of hiring outside specialists was proposed by the law school's Institutional Life Committee.

Composed of faculty, students and administrators, Institutional Life is one of five committees formed as part of SPI.

The other four committees that look into infrastructure, internationalization, connections to the profession, and academic development were convened along with Institutional Life by the dean to analyze specific areas of the HLS experience.

According to Story Professor of Law Daniel J. Meltzer, who chairs the SPI steering committee, the McKinsey team was not brought in to fix a specific problem per se but rather to help "the institution look beyond day-to-day operations and form a long-term plan."

Gottlieb Professor of Law Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Institutional Life Committee, says her committee was charged with studying both the student and faculty populations at HLS.

Noting that Harvard boasts one of the two largest law schools in the country, Warren suggests that hiring a consulting firm was necessary in order for her committee "to get a systematic understanding of the student experience."

Warren says that members of the Institutional Life Committee interviewed six consulting firms before settling on McKinsey.

"We wanted expertise in data gathering and analysis as well as the capacity to take on issues of student life," Warren says.

McKinsey's Web site, which features extensive lists of the company's fields of practice and areas of research, contains no mention of academic consulting.

But Warren says that in their initial interviews with the firm, McKinsey representatives told members of the Institutional Life Committee that they had done work for educational institutions in the past.

Simon Mendelson, a McKinsey partner who graduated from the law school in 1990, says that his firm does not have a specific practice for academic consulting but said that aspects of the HLS study--for instance, its attention to student satisfaction and school governance--coincided with specialty areas of McKinsey's corporate practice.

The Process

Mendelson, who headed the McKinsey team that conducted the study, says he appreciates that "there was some healthy skepticism on both sides" when his colleagues first arrived on campus.

"I hope most people think it was worthwhile to have an outside firm come in and gather facts, which is what we did," Mendelson says.

He offers a minimalist description of McKinsey's role.

"Our approach is to let the law school solve the problems of the law school," Mendelson says. "We just provide the data."

Throughout the initial, fact-finding phase of McKinsey's consultation, the firm solicited input from members of the HLS community, according to both Mendelson and Institutional Life members.

Warren describes how McKinsey conducted its research by sending out surveys to students and alumni, holding meetings, conducting one-on-one interviews and inviting students, faculty and administrators to attend small gatherings where members of the firm took notes about life at HLS.

Amy Oliver, a student who sits on the Institutional Life Committee, says McKinsey prepared a preliminary student survey and then submitted it to the committee for review.

"We went over it word by word and made our changes," Oliver remembers.

The revised survey questionnaire was then sent out to the student body, and a slightly amended version was mailed to alumni from the Classes of 1985, 1990, 1995, 1996, 1997 and 1998, according to Warren.

The Data

While a thorough analysis of the survey results has not yet become available, by most accounts, the students aired complaints related to the law school's huge size. HLS currently has about 550 students.

Charlotte P. Armstrong '49, an HLS alumna who sits on an advisory visiting committee and who is outgoing president of the Harvard Board of Overseers, calls the size of the school its greatest virtue and its greatest curse.

Warren says that McKinsey's preliminary data reveals "class size, student-faculty feedback and faculty advising" are the major areas for improvement.

Her colleague Meltzer suggests that these three concerns are actually connected.

"The complaint about lack of feedback in legal education is, unfortunately, a perennial one," Meltzer says. "It's linked, in a way, to the class-size problem."

"How realistic is it to expect a faculty member teaching a class of 150 students [a typical course enrollment figure at HLS] to give a lot of detailed feedback to each of his or her students?" Meltzer asks.

In addition to demanding more contact with their professors, students who answered the surveys expressed a desire for HLS to go on a hiring campaign.

Oliver, who has just completed her second year at the law school, says she appreciates the resources HLS has to offer. For her, the school's large size requires it to provide extra facilities and faculty breadth.

"I came to Harvard because it offered me the most opportunities," Oliver says.

Cash and Charge?

In addition to their size-related concerns, students also aired grievances about HLS's facilities and its largesse. According to both Warren and Meltzer, the sub-par quality of the Hemenway Gym came up frequently in student responses to McKinsey's inquiries.

Oliver suggests that by allocating funds to refurbish Hemenway, the administration could dramatically boost students' quality of life.

"Part of the reason the McKinsey study was undertaken was for a fundraising campaign," Oliver suggests. "There's virtually nothing you can do [to improve HLS] that doesn't require money."