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• Entrepeneurship Education

In the early 1980s a few graduate business schools began to offer courses in entrepreneurship and small business management. In the years that followed, most U.S. business schools followed suit and now have substantial course offerings in this area. Undergraduate programs also have proliferated. About ten years later, entrepreneurship and business management programs were initiated at a number of engineering schools, sometimes on the graduate level, sometimes as a survey course for undergraduate engineering students and sometimes as a community outreach or clinical program. Entrepreneurship is now a standard part of the curriculum at most American engineering schools.

These ideas have crystallized more slowly among legal educators. There are scattered law school courses that teach students how to draft corporate and commercial documents and others devoted to different kinds of business associations, but almost none that address entrepreneurship and new ventures as a stand-alone subject. Likewise, there are a number of community development and affordable housing clinics that provide legal assistance to small business owners and nonprofit organizations, usually in the immediate vicinity of the law school. However, until the mid to late-1990s there was no clinical program whose primary mission was to teach law students relatively sophisticated transactional law in a hands-on, real-world setting.

• The Northwestern Law School Model

The entrepreneurship program at Northwestern Law is the result of student demand for courses that prepare them to be transactional lawyers. While the Socratic method, employed primarily in the first year, is a wonderful way in which to introduce students to legal concepts and teach them the fundamentals of legal reasoning and analysis, it is not particularly effective in teaching students what they will need to know to handle a corporate or commercial transaction. In major law firms, this gap in the experience and training of incoming associates requires the firms to provide on-the-job training, occasionally through in-house educational programs and, more often, by turning newcomers loose on the firms' paying clients.

It was pointed out by student advocates at Northwestern that the clinical programs now offered at almost every American law school do a good job of teaching students how to be trial lawyers, but have no lasting value for the large portion of the student body who are looking for a career in transactional law, and the sizeable number who intend to use their legal training as an entrée into corporate management, investment banking or consulting rather than private law practice.

In September 1998, Northwestern unveiled its comprehensive entrepreneurship program.

• "LawBus" Listserv

A number of prominent American law schools are now operating small business clinics or teaching entrepreneurship law in the classroom on the Northwestern model. Educators interested in this subject may subscribe to the LawBus e-mail listserv by contacting Northwestern's Small Business Opportunity Center at Email: small-business@northwestern.edu.

PROVIDING LEGAL ASSISTANCE TO INVENTORS & INNOVATORS THROUGH LAW SCHOOL CLINICS (pdf)