Business Organization and Finance: Legal and Economic Principles

Excellent text. Perfect supplement to casebook or other coursebook on the subject. Sometimes is a little dense, but overall quite worthwhile.

If you are a lawyer without (good) formal education in finance yet you need finance in your practice or research, there are several courses you can take. You can suffer through the endless toing and froing and joking of Brealey and Myers (Principles of Corporate Finance). Or you can spend some quality time reading well structured, well written Tirole (The Theory of Corporate Finance), but you will have to either skip or crack the math there. Or you can learn it by doing, which will involve some serious hazards for your clients and fee write-offs for your partner if you are in practice, or some silly blunders if you teach and write. Or - you can read Klein and Coffee. The authors' mission statement is to write a simple but not simplistic introduction to the subject and, for the most part, their book does just that. It does not hide behind jargon or math. It does not skip basic (yet difficult) undelying concepts and assumptions, pretending that they are too easy to be even mentioned. It does not look down on the innumerate lawyer. It just gives you an honest low-down on what capital structure of a business is all about and how all that matters for the rules of corporate law. Talking about law, the book (quite predictably) shows a slight American bias but the bias is really only slight - because most of the examples do not rely on positive legal rules but rather on standard commercial situations that arise in corporate financing, you will be able to make good use of the book whether or not you are familiar with American corporate law and whether or not you care about it (or any other particular national law indeed). An excellent starting point (no matter how long ago you have actually started).

This book is a well-written, interesting, sometimes chatty look at the wonderful world of Business Associations. It conformed well to the topics in my BA class; I think the professor was inspired by it in some of his powerpoints. It conformed poorly, however, to our casebook, Klein's own. This was surprising to me. Therefore, this book is most useful as a big picture giver, not a resource to prepare for exams or to get cliffs notes on cases. Nonetheless, I recommend it. You'll feel like you understand BA after you read it. Watch out though, because, for the reasons stated above, this feeling will probably not correlate to exam success unless you are diligent with the casebook.