What do you get when you cross one of the world's best known law schools with a global management consulting firm? The answer, Harvard Law School (HLS) hopes, is an improved academic institution.

Over the course of this past spring, a team of consultants from McKinsey & Co. conducted a study of the premier law institution--currently placed second in the annual graduate school rankings by U.S. News & World Report--which has yet to be completed.

The McKinsey study, in particular, seeks to analyze the school's strengths and weaknesses both for students and faculty and will be used by HLS officials to make plans for long-term development.

Neither senior law school officials nor representatives from McKinsey were willing to comment on the price of the firm's consultation, but several sources estimate the figure to be anywhere between $800,000 and $ 1 million.

But some students feel that HLS, which already employs some of the nation's sharpest minds, is wasting its money by outsourcing its planning.

"A lot of students share the sentiment that the law school is spending close to $1 million to hire McKinsey to get what it could have gotten for free," says Hamilton Chan '95, a third-year law student.

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What will Harvard get for its money?

That's the question on the minds of many HLS students and even a few professors as they await McKinsey's preliminary report, due by the end of the summer.

The plan to hire consultants began as part of HLS's Strategic Planning Initiative (SPI), launched in the fall of 1998. SPI is charged with providing HLS with a vision for the future as it heads into the new millennium.

HLS Dean Robert C. Clark formally invited McKinsey after the idea of hiring outside specialists was proposed by the law school's Institutional Life Committee.

Composed of faculty, students and administrators, Institutional Life is one of five committees formed as part of SPI.

The other four committees that look into infrastructure, internationalization, connections to the profession, and academic development were convened along with Institutional Life by the dean to analyze specific areas of the HLS experience.

According to Story Professor of Law Daniel J. Meltzer, who chairs the SPI steering committee, the McKinsey team was not brought in to fix a specific problem per se but rather to help "the institution look beyond day-to-day operations and form a long-term plan."

Gottlieb Professor of Law Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Institutional Life Committee, says her committee was charged with studying both the student and faculty populations at HLS.