S. Entrepreneurship

This seminar course aims to give students a client-focused legal and business perspective on working with high-growth entrepreneurial ventures. Students in the course will gain unique insight into the entrepreneur/attorney relationship not only by exploring legal issues but through a series of exercises in which students will place themselves in the shoes of the entrepreneur by working with ideas for new businesses within a guided framework.

The course will cover the key legal issues that factor into the creation and development of an emerging growth company, such as formation, structuring, equity allocations, intellectual property considerations, commercial relationships and financing. In order to better understand the process of the evolution of a startup, the study of legal issues will be integrated with an examination of the key business concepts that are relevant to creating a high-growth, high-impact company. Students will be directly involved in brainstorming new ideas that they generate themselves, and will learn how to test the basic viability of those ideas. After an idea is developed, students will be exposed to business concepts such as customer discovery, market sizing, pricing, competition and distribution, and will work towards finding a scalable, repeatable business model, and develop the idea into a company. We will also study financing strategies and the financing process, and dive deeply into the process of raising capital at different stages of the venture’s development, again with a focus on the common approaches for financing high-growth ventures.

Course requirements include imagination, flexibility, courage and passion. The coursework will include intensive team projects, weekly assignments, fieldwork and weekly readings. Students will apply their legal skills through individual and group drafting exercises, case discussions, mock negotiations and role playing. By the end of the semester, students will be comfortable building a company blueprint and final investor pitch. There is a pre-assignment due during the first class. Grades will be calculated based on weekly individual and group assignments, class participation, the final team project, and a take home exam.

Instructors will select students from the waitlist.