A Small Firm with a Major Social Impact SCOTT CURRAN BEYOND ADVISORS
Scott Curran, founder and CEO of Beyond Advisers, discusses the nature of his social impact consultancy, how his experience at the Clinton Foundation informed his current venture, and what law firms and legal departments can do to recognize and expand upon their own social impact practices. CCBJ: Please tell us about Beyond Advisers and what it does. Scott Curran: Beyond Advisers is a full-service social impact consulting practice – in boutique form. Many people are still trying to understand what “social impact” means in this context, so it invites some intrigue. A simple definition for an audience of my brethren corporate lawyers would be that we take the best of what you’d get with a full-service corporate law practice and combine it with traditional consulting in the rapidly evolving social impact landscape. We have more than a decade of experience serving nonprofit social enterprises, the private sector, and cross-sector social impact initiatives at scale. Basically we put all of those things together in a small boutique with a small number of people, serving that space with a tool kit that combines all of that aforementioned experience. That’s what it means to be a full-service social impact consulting firm. We tell our clients, “We are lawyers, but we’re not your lawyers in this case. We are consultants.” We’re marrying these very different but interrelated skill sets, along with the best advice, guidance and tools in the world, combining all that with the best ideas and efforts to change the world for the better. The clients we serve primarily include: 1) nonprofits; and 2) private sector businesses that are trying to do 26
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good in the world with their business model. We work with law firms as well, which we consider part of the private sector. People tend to refer to the private sector as traditional businesses that are not law firms, but law firms are businesses and they provide products and services to clients – so we consider that part of the private sector. And the third area we serve is crosssector partnerships. These are initiatives born from the work of all of the above, nonprofits working with for-profits, or working with government in various combinations. So we say nonprofits, the private sector and cross-sector partnerships. That’s what Beyond Advisers is – a social impact consultancy, full-service work based on unprecedented experience. Five years after taking a job out of law school, you decided to pivot and pursue a master’s degree in public service. What was the motivation behind that decision? I always knew I was likely to do something beyond being a corporate lawyer or a private law firm team member. I was always looking for what would come next. I went to law school in the late 1990s, which was a very exciting time because it was before the first dotcom bubble, and everybody got jobs afterward. The issue wasn’t whether you’d get a job coming out of law school, it was which job you would get. So going to law school opened up many, many doors. But I was definitely one of those people who wasn’t planning on having a traditional legal career. I entered law school thinking it would be a great, exciting, vibrant education, which would open a lot of doors, but I was always planning to look at what other doors might open later too. I wound up falling into the traditional pattern that most law students naturally fall into, which is oncampus interviews, getting a summer associate
