Noting that Harvard boasts one of the two largest law schools in the country, Warren suggests that hiring a consulting firm was necessary in order for her committee "to get a systematic understanding of the student experience."

Warren says that members of the Institutional Life Committee interviewed six consulting firms before settling on McKinsey.

"We wanted expertise in data gathering and analysis as well as the capacity to take on issues of student life," Warren says.

McKinsey's Web site, which features extensive lists of the company's fields of practice and areas of research, contains no mention of academic consulting.

But Warren says that in their initial interviews with the firm, McKinsey representatives told members of the Institutional Life Committee that they had done work for educational institutions in the past.

Simon Mendelson, a McKinsey partner who graduated from the law school in 1990, says that his firm does not have a specific practice for academic consulting but said that aspects of the HLS study--for instance, its attention to student satisfaction and school governance--coincided with specialty areas of McKinsey's corporate practice.

The Process

Mendelson, who headed the McKinsey team that conducted the study, says he appreciates that "there was some healthy skepticism on both sides" when his colleagues first arrived on campus.

"I hope most people think it was worthwhile to have an outside firm come in and gather facts, which is what we did," Mendelson says.

He offers a minimalist description of McKinsey's role.

"Our approach is to let the law school solve the problems of the law school," Mendelson says. "We just provide the data."

Throughout the initial, fact-finding phase of McKinsey's consultation, the firm solicited input from members of the HLS community, according to both Mendelson and Institutional Life members.

Warren describes how McKinsey conducted its research by sending out surveys to students and alumni, holding meetings, conducting one-on-one interviews and inviting students, faculty and administrators to attend small gatherings where members of the firm took notes about life at HLS.

Amy Oliver, a student who sits on the Institutional Life Committee, says McKinsey prepared a preliminary student survey and then submitted it to the committee for review.

"We went over it word by word and made our changes," Oliver remembers.