Curtis Anderson
Curtis Anderson is a Professor of Law at the Brigham Young University Law School. He teaches courses in the areas of corporate formation and governance, mergers and acquisitions, securities and e-commerce. He is a faculty member of the BYU Crocker Innovation Fellowship Program, which is an interdisciplinary, one-year innovation experience for undergraduate students from any major and where he teaches with faculty from the Colleges of Business, Engineering, Life Sciences, and Physical & Mathematical Sciences. He also supervises the BYU Law and Entrepreneurship Clinic.
Professor Anderson practiced law for over 20 years before teaching at BYU Law. He came to BYU Law from the Match Group, where he was a Senior Vice President and the General Counsel. He was responsible for all legal matters of Match’s operating companies, which included match.com, Tinder, okcupid, meetic and other social media and online dating businesses based in Dallas, New York City, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Vancouver, Tokyo, Ghent and Rio de Janeiro. Prior to joining the Match Group, he was a partner in the Dallas office of a large international law firm where he represented clients in complex mergers and acquisitions, public offerings (debt and equity), VC financing and general corporate matters. He has also served on the board of directors of Encircle since 2018.
Professor Anderson received an undergraduate degree in Near Eastern Studies and his law degree from BYU.
My classes incorporate simulated fact patterns based on actual transactions or matters I have experienced. I don’t use text books. Rather than requiring a right or wrong answer, I encourage students to be creative and innovative when structuring a solution to the problem or scenario. Additionally, in the Law and Entrepreneurship Clinic, the faculty and legal mentors have as little direct interaction with the clients as possible, allowing the students to engage directly and fully in the client relationship and interaction.
Structurally in some cases, where the student maintains full responsibility and control over the design of the solution. By learning outcome in other cases, where the student is asked to develop the only solution but to be creative and innovative when designing a solution that reflects the student’s personality and background.
I meet regularly with students to review and discuss assignments. For most assignments, we go over an example of a solution in class. When doing so, I invite and encourage students to participate by explaining how they approached the problem from an different angle or with a different solution. I attempt to design classes in a way that students learn and develop from the reviews of the projects and not only from doing the project itself.
Respect, excitement about the subject matter and a tone that reflects that I take the subject matter and learning experience seriously.
My most effective work and mentoring environment is in one-on-one or small group meetings outside of class. An average week consists of meeting with 12 to 15 students individually or in small groups outside of class. It is time consuming. I allocate 60 to 90 minutes a day during the work week for meetings with students outside of class.