Associates who missed out on a place at Harvard Law School could score a second chance with international law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy. The firm has teamed up with Harvard’s Law and Business faculties to provide professional development courses on business, accounting, economics, finance and negotiating – the areas clients themselves care most deeply about.

The program is called Milbank@Harvard and sessions of eight days of intensive study will be run out of Harvard’s Cambridge, Massachusetts campus. All associates will be invited to attend, including foreign office staff, with some 40 associates expected to go through the program each session. This means somewhere between 100-150 associates will complete the training program each year.

As opposed to a training seat rotation or secondment with a client, this is the first course of its type designed for associates in their third to seventh years. "We don't know of anyone who is doing something like this," said Scott Edelman, vice chairman at Milbank. Edelman also emphasised the fact that the professional development commitment runs for a number of years and is not simply a one-year program.

Milbank is hoping that the costs of the training will be justified by more associates staying with the firm for the promise of a Harvard education. However, costs are estimated to be significant: Harvard tuition, travel and accommodation expenses and billable hours missed while associates attend sessions will require substantially more money than those firms who provide similar training in-house outlay. And according to Eric Seeger, a consultant with US firm Altman Weil who specialises in law firm strategy, the course won’t be a substitute for the business knowledge associates gain through secondments with clients, where they see how a business ‘really functions’.