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The Entrepreneurial Law Clinic celebrates ten years of providing critical early-stage legal and business counsel.

The Entrepreneurial Law Clinic (ELC) is an innovative clinic serving entrepreneurs throughout the Pacific Northwest. The clinic provides critical early-stage legal and business counsel and allows law students to work in an interdisciplinary capacity with business students and professionals, helping entrepreneurs in need to access legal services. Through a comprehensive audit memo process, these students assist clients with forming legal business entities, contract review and negotiation, drafting trademark registrations and patent applications and other entrepreneurial matters.

This year the ELC is celebrating its 10th anniversary. In ten years, the clinic has assisted 295 microenterprises, high tech ventures, nonprofit and social ventures and CoMotion spin-offs.

Student work includes:

1. SignAloud, a device that detects and interprets American Sign Language into English, was awarded the 2016 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, an award given to the country’s most innovative undergraduate and graduate students. The company received assistance from the ELC with matters related to the formation of their business and patentability analysis.
2. Landesa, a nonprofit organization that seeks to empower disenfranchised individuals in developing countries through land ownership and associated rights, received assistance from the ELC with regard to business considerations, tax and corporate legal matters.
3. The ELC provided legal consultation to GiveSafe, a startup that facilitates cashless charitable giving through Bluetooth-enabled technology. GiveSafe received assistance in the areas of business law and IP.

Through these projects, students gain experience in critical fields such as intellectual property (IP), corporate and securities law and tax while providing innovators with cost-effective means of assessing their legal and business goals.

This story first appeared in the Fall 2016 newsletter.

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