Rachel Krol
Senior Advisor and Associate Partner
Cambridge Family Enterprise Group
Rachel Krol is a senior advisor and associate partner at Cambridge Advisors to Family Enterprise, a highly specialized international advisory firm serving family enterprises. Cambridge Advisors and Cambridge Institute for Family Enterprise, an education and research institute, are divisions of Cambridge Family Enterprise Group, a global organization founded in 1989. It is devoted to helping families and ownership groups navigate the new economy and achieve multigenerational success for their families, enterprises, and financial wealth.
Ms. Krol advises family-owned enterprises on the strategies for growing, unifying, and sustaining their enterprises into the next generation. As an attorney, facilitator, coach, and professor of negotiation and dispute resolution, Ms. Krol specializes in facilitating difficult conversations and constructive processes for building alignment. She advises families on building family and owner teams, family communication, conflict resolution, and negotiation. She also assists families with implementing effective family and owner governance systems and processes. Her work helps families and ownership groups build their capacity for effectively managing their relationships, communication, and conflicts.
Ms. Krol holds two faculty positions: Lecturer of Negotiation at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Lecturer on Law at Penn Law School and is the recipient of multiple Wharton Teaching Excellence awards. Previously, she served as the Assistant Director of the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program at Harvard Law School, where she taught courses on negotiation, conflict resolution, facilitation, and dispute system design and coached law students in the theory and practice of dispute resolution as they worked assisting client organizations around the world build their capacity for effective conflict management and successful negotiation. She also teaches in the Making Family Councils More Effective program and the Preparing Owners of a Family Business program at the Cambridge Institute for Family Enterprise and has co-authored cases that focus on ownership negotiations across generations in family businesses.
Prior to joining the Harvard Law School faculty, Ms. Krol taught negotiation at institutions around the world, including Harvard Law School’s executive education programs, Georgetown University Law Center, and the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Ms. Krol practiced law with the firms Drinker, Biddle & Reath LLP (now Faegre Drinker LLP) and Ahmad Zaffarese LLC in Philadelphia, where she advised clients on matters related to mergers and acquisitions, securities regulation, corporate finance and civil litigation.
Ms. Krol earned her JD from Harvard Law School and her BA in History from Columbia University.