杏吧论坛

Dr Suren Gomtsyan

Edmund Schuster, David Kershaw, Alperen Gözlügöl

This course will first be available during the 2025/26 academic session.

This course will be compulsory on the new MSc in Law and Finance programme in 2025/26.

“Corporate Transactions: Law” will allow students to identify, analyse, discuss, and propose solutions to the recurring problems arising in different types of corporate transactions in the real world. The idea of this course is simple. All complex business transactions respond to a small set of economic challenges. Those challenges are often addressed with well-known solutions that have been designed and tested by transactional lawyers; but sometimes we also need customised solutions. Hence, for drafting effective deal documentation, lawyers need to understand the economic structure of deals to be able to identify the relevant challenges and select appropriate contractual tools for addressing those challenges.

The course is built on the premise that understanding why corporate transactions are structured and documented, in the way they are, will both help students become more effective lawyers and, importantly, make more tangible, accessible and understandable the theoretical foundations used to explain dealmaking in the legal and economic literature. The course is central to the new programme, as it will demonstrate to students how economic problems shape law and legal practice, and how corporate lawyers use their legal skills to be effective “transaction cost engineers”. The structure of the course will also highlight to students how conceptually similar problems appear across different transaction types and improve their ability to identify functional similarities across the range of legal solutions used across these transaction types.

The course aims to introduce students to the structure of complex business deals and develop practical skills for reading and drafting corporate contracts. The course will also help to develop basic entrepreneurial and financial skills and prepare for a work in a team.

The primary objective of this course is to teach students how business lawyers add value to corporate transactions. More specifically, the course aims to teach to students the main problems of structuring corporate deals and the common techniques of dealing with these problems. Modern corporate deals can be complex with documentation exceeding a hundred pages. Many sections of those documents seem to be highly standardised and inclu