BRIAN K. PRICE: Good afternoon everyone.
I want to make an admission right off the bat
that when I was asked to do this I was a bit hesitant
about doing that.
And the reason is HLS Thinks Big.
And that title quite frankly is pretty intimidating.
So I thought to myself, what is it about the nature of the work
that I do that's so big that is going
to change the world because it's innovative, it's trailblazing,
it's unique?
And quite frankly, nothing.
OK, so I decided to change my thinking a little bit.
It's not necessarily the big things
that are going to change the world so much,
but rather the seemingly small, insignificant, and little
things.
So this way of thinking actually aligns a lot
with the way in which I teach my students
in the transactional law clinics.
That it's not necessarily the big picture
that you necessarily will focus on all the time.
Sure, keep your eye on what the deal is
and where you want it to wind up,
but don't let the big picture obscure your vision
of the little things.
In fact, every deal has so many micro transactions within it,
so many small component parts to the deal,
it's similar to individual pixels on a TV screen.
It's the little things that determine if the big things
will actually happen.
So a deal can actually turn on the language of one word, one
punctuation mark, one tweak to the timing,
one change of the process.
One of my interests for some time now has been,
how do we make the lives of people better as a society?
And so before coming to Harvard I worked in state government
at the Office of Minority and Women Business Assistance.
And one of my first assignments there
when I got there was to rewrite the regulations about who
would qualify for the program.
And this was in the early 1990s, and at the time
there was a $14 billion highway construction project
going on known as the Big Dig.
So with a change of a word here or there
I would determine who would qualify
for lucrative construction projects.
When I came to Harvard about 20 years ago
my first position was as a clinical instructor in the Hale
and Dorr Legal Service Center's Community Enterprise project.
And our mission at the time was to provide legal services
to community based entrepreneurs and organizations who otherwise
might not have access to pro bono legal services,
or low cost legal services.
So over the years I've thought a lot about why
it is that we don't see transformations
in communities except when there's gentrification.
Because I've been doing transactional law
for so many years I see things through the eyes
of a transactional lawyer.
So when I look at laws and regulations what I see
are transactional deal points.
In every transaction involving private parties
there is also an additional party there.
And that additional party is we the public, we society.
The public's deal points in every transaction
are the laws and regulations that
exist, whether it's a transaction involving
a lease, an employment agreement, financing agreement.
These are the laws that relate the private party transactions,
but the public is always there.
For example, when a business wants
to locate itself at a particular location,
there are zoning laws.
When a business wants to hire personnel,
they have to consider the employment
laws, independent contractor laws,
or whether this person might qualify for an internship.
If somebody wants to form a new entity
they have to conform to the existing entity structures,
and pay a filing fee for the privilege to exist.
When an asset is to be transferred
we have to look at whether it's a taxable transaction or not.
When the business wants to sell an interest to someone
we have to look at the securities laws.
So none of these transactions can legitimately
be accomplished without reference
to the law and regulations.
It's as if we the public have a seat at every deal table.
We the public control process, control cost, control risk,
and control even deal breakers.
So one way to facilitate economic development
in low opportunity communities is
to affect as much as we can the deal,
to make them less expensive, to make the approval process
a lot more quick so that entrepreneurial activity
actually can breathe.
So one size fits all approach may not
clog up the years of business for big business,
but certainly they do have an effect on small businesses.
Now it's interesting when a city wants
to attract the big business it can offer tax breaks,
it can offer infrastructure improvements,
it can tweak the transaction, tailor
the circumstances to facilitate the deal's bottom line.
So when it matters to the public it can be done.
And there's no transactional legal reason
why the same approach could not be
applied to underdeveloped neighborhoods.
So as a transactional lawyer I can make a deal easier, harder,
more expensive, less expensive, just by the language
that I choose.
The same power exists for the public.
We're a third party in every transaction.
So if we want to make deals within communities
less expensive, the process faster,
we can take an affirmative intentional approach
to doing that.
We can accelerate business activity,
we can lower barriers to entry, we can improve sustainability.
So for businesses that don't have
a lot of startup capital, which is the case when we're talking
about businesses that typically want to go into low opportunity
communities, it's these little things
like reducing cost, like speeding up approval times that
can facilitate development.
We could even extend our community engineering
one step further.
When my son was in middle school he had a math assignment.
And his math assignment was to look at ratios,
and pick any subjects he wanted to pick.
So I was his dad, he was a kid.
I made a suggestion to look at the various storefront
operations along the street that we lived in,
in the neighborhood that we lived in at the time,
and to look at the store for an operations that were there.
So he recorded all the storefronts along the street--
hair salons, barber shops, sub shops, pizza shops,
convenience stores, liquor stores, churches,
hardware stores--
and the ratios of the establishments
didn't tell a good story.
The ratio of liquor stores, for example,
to other kinds of establishments was relatively too high.
And certainly too high for a community
in need of development.
So if the will of the public is to facilitate
economic development in the places where it's needed then
the public as a third party, and every deal can do that.
We control process, we control overall deal cost,
we can control who our business can
afford to hire and not to hire.
So while we often focus on the big picture of what
we want to see, let's not overlook
that transactional deal points are
embedded in every regulation.
And it's not as if they're fixed in stone, because we the public
can rewrite regulations and make their application
malleable to fit the circumstances
of a particular community.
And it's these transactional deal points,
these little things that can either impede development
or can facilitate development.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]