Andrew Kaufman

Andrew Kaufman joined Maine Law as professor of practice in 2016, bringing more than 40 years of experience in private practice and more than a decade of experience teaching transactional courses and practice skills. He has mentored fledgling transactional law students at several of the country’s leading law schools, including Vanderbilt University Law School, UCLA School of Law, and the University of Southern California Gould School of Law.

Building on his long interest in the pedagogy of teaching transactional lawyering skills, Professor Kaufman’s courses address – from a transactional lawyer’s perspective – such topics as business associations, commercial law (including secured transactions), leveraged buyouts, mergers and acquisitions, risk management and compliance, syndicated loan transactions, and various other current issues in transactional practice. When feasible, Professor Kaufman combines the doctrinal elements of his subject matter with the experiential in order to give students background in not only “why,” but “how.” He uses hypotheticals based on actual transactions to help students understand the inherent and external risks presented by both the transaction and the transactional process itself and how to use their lawyering skills to identify and mitigate those risks.

Professor Kaufman was a long-time partner with Kirkland & Ellis LLP handling matters primarily from their Chicago and New York City offices. He founded and, for many years, supervised the Firm’s Debt Finance Group and chaired the Firm’s Opinions Committee. Now of counsel to the Firm, Professor Kaufman continues to participate in its professional training programs and to advise on internal risk management matters.

At Vanderbilt Law, Professor Kaufman served as an adjunct professor from 2005-2009. In 2009, he was appointed their first professor of the practice of law for the Law and Business Program, a position he held for next three years. He spent the 2012-13 academic year at UCLA Law, where he served as professor from practice and the initial executive director of UCLA’s Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy. He has been  offering his transactional “weekend short courses” at University of Southern California Gould School of Law since 2008, and he continues to present them  from time to time also at Vanderbilt Law.

In addition to teaching his courses in Maine Law’s J.D. program, Professor Kaufman is involved in the transactional curricular planning within both the Law School, where he directs the Business and Transactional Law Certificate Program, and the broader University System. This includes the development of collaborative courses with the Graduate School of Business and other initiatives within the University’s Graduate and Professional Center. He is also involved with student mentoring and counseling, and with various outreach initiatives to the business law community in Maine. He is the faculty advisor to the Business Law Association student group. He also serves as the director of Maine Law’s Compliance Program, a professional development program for compliance personnel in the private and public sectors, and he teaches the Foundational Principles course in that program.

Professor Kaufman was one of the faculty presenters at the 2018 Sixth Biennial Conference on the Teaching of Transactional Law and Skills at Emory University School of Law, addressing the importance of “transactional context” in transactional law pedagogy and various approaches he has developed for creating “transactional context” for his students.

Professor Kaufman is currently serving on a committee with Maine’s Commissioners to the national Uniform Laws Commission, leading Maine commercial law practitioners and members of the Maine Legislature advocating adoption of the 2022 Amendments to the Uniform Commercial Code in Maine.

Professor Kaufman is a member of the New York-based TriBar Legal Opinion Committee. From 2014 to 2021, he served as president (and he presently continues as a director) of the Working Group on Legal Opinions Foundation, a national organization whose members include approximately 110 of the country’s largest law firms and some 50 national, state, and local bar associations and practice affinity groups focusing on education, practice, and procedure in the context of transactional legal opinions. In addition, over the years he has been a frequent presenter at continuing legal education programs addressing topics in the areas of transactional legal opinions, commercial law, secured transactions, licensing, and insolvency. Professor Kaufman received his B.A. (cum laude) in 1971 from Yale and his J.D. in 1974 from Vanderbilt Law, where he was editor-in-chief of the Vanderbilt Law Review and was elected to the Order of the Coif.