This book is designed to assist law students and practitioners learn the basics of business. Specifically, in addition to narrative explanations of business concepts, unlike many other books on this subject, this book also provides case studies and problem sets to enable law students to experientially learn how to identify legal risk and potential legal issues from analyzing a company's business issues and corporate financial statements. Accountants, not lawyers, create financial statements, so this book teaches law students how to read and analyze financial statements as users, not creators of those documents.

With this book, law students should finish the course with an ability to (i) read and analyze three of the four main corporate financial statements, (ii) understand the legal and business differences between the different types of capital, (iii) understand and perform basic time value of money calculations, (iv) articulate the process by which a corporation accesses capital in the private and publicly traded financial markets, (v) conceptualize different means of calculating a corporation's stock, debt and overall corporate value, and (vi) identify legal risks and means of mitigating those risks on behalf of corporate clients through the analysis of a client's financial statements. This book is inclusively written for use by students interested in business and non-business practice areas whether in family law, medical malpractice, corporate transactions, or litigation.