Technology Startup Clinic

The Technology Startup Clinic is one of the UC Hastings Innovation Law Clinics. This clinic brings law students into the Bay Area startup community by having students work on real startup company issues under the supervision of experienced lawyers in the field.  Currently, our students are working with Pillsbury Winthrop, Wilson Sonsini, Orrick, Herrington, DLA Piper and Womble Carlyle to deliver legal services to our technology clients.  To ensure that we reach underserved clients the clinic only accepts legal projects through our partner incubators: Hackers and Founders, Black Founders, Women 2.0 and Girls in Tech.  These incubators perform the initial screening that allows us to select legal work that is appropriate for our teaching purposes. Any business entity that wishes to seek the clinic’s services should contact one of our partner incubators.

Open to: 5^th and 6^th semester students.

12 units: Yearlong, 2 unit non-GPA class and 4 unit fieldwork component, graded pass-fail, must be taken concurrently both semesters.

Prerequisites: Corporations or Business Associations + one of the following: Corporate Finance, Employment Law, Sales & Leases, Securities Regulation, Venture Capital, or Business Planning.

Classroom Component: Weekly seminar will address substantive business law and practice, transactional lawyering skills, client work and the professional role of the business lawyer. This course will orient students to the expectations of a business law practice and students will develop and apply transactional lawyering skills such as transaction planning and management, client interviewing and counseling, legal research, and contract and business document drafting.

Fieldwork Component: Under the close supervision of a practicing attorney, students will work with entrepreneurs in their very early stages of business planning, including issues related to entity formation, intellectual property, contracts, employment, and funding.

To enroll: Students should submit an application, a resume, a list of courses completed, and a statement of interest to Lesley King in faculty support at kingl@uchastings.edu.  Please contact Professor Feldman with questions at feldmanr@uchastings.edu.  The deadline for this application April 12, 2013

About Innovation Law Clinics

The Innovation Law Clinics (ILC) is comprised of three clinics: the BioTech Startup Clinic, the Technology Startup Clinic, and the Social Enterprise Law Clinic. For more information on each, please see below.

About the ILC

Our goal is to teach students how to become partners in enterprise, not just the lawyers in the room, because the best business lawyers are those who understand the incentive structures that drive business organizations outside of and in addition to the legal regimes. Innovation Law Clinics will introduce and orient students to the materials, expectations, interactions, disciplines and vocabulary of transactional practice, particularly corporate and intellectual property practices.

For fieldwork students work on corporate and intellectual property projects for startups, social enterprises, non-profit organizations, and early stage life science inventors. The students’ legal work is supervised by experienced attorneys, including UC Hastings faculty and practicing attorneys from law firms with expertise in the field.

In the seminar component the students will examine in a more focused fashion the substantive legal doctrines and skills they are applying in the field. For the 2012-2013 academic year there are  2 clinic modules within the Innovation Law Clinics program: BioTech Startup Clinic focusing on intellectual property work for bioscience startups; Startup Technology Clinic, focusing on general corporate work for technology startups; and a Social Enterprise and Nonprofit Law Clinic (launching 2013-2014).

Please contact Professor Lucy Dilworth with questions at dilworth@uchastings.edu