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<p>How are they going to leverage the Harvard name quietly? If a firm is going to pay thousands just to be able to use the Harvard brand, I would assume they’d advertise it extensively. Though once you think about how they’d do that, the practicality of the scheme starts to fall apart. They’d have to use pretty ambiguous phrasing to describe their Harvard connection, since the only person with an HLS degree would be an associate who is not doing much work. That could run them into some trouble with attorney advertising laws, since they tend to be pretty strict. Even if it doesn’t, I imagine that a client who retains the firm because they’re attracted to the Harvard name would be very upset to discover that non-Harvard lawyers were doing the bulk of the work on their case and would probably be inclined to file a complaint with the bar. At the very least, they won’t refer anyone to the firm, which is how small firms actually generate business.</p>
<p>And as I asked before, if they’re willing to pay so much to use the Harvard name in somewhat-disingenuous advertising, why not take some Harvard Extension classes, or pay for a current associate to do so? That’s a much cheaper option.</p>
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<p>This is unrealistic, because you can’t just “scale down” the salary like that in exchange for a reduced workload. Consider biglaw firms that hire associates at $160K with a 2000 billable hour target. Are they willing to hire associates at $70K with a 1000 hour target? Absolutely not. Firms simply have no interest in hiring an associate who only wants to do “some work”, even if it’s at a lower rate than they’d normally pay. </p>
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<p>Or a handful, anyway, all of which already have the HLS credential they’re marketing. It’s not clear how much anyone would be willing to pay for it. I mean, anything’s possible, but it seems like a really bad idea to plan on making money with a marketing scheme that doesn’t exist anywhere right now, as far as you’ve been able to show, and has some obvious practical problems.</p>