The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well among faculty designing courses to engage law students, as well as students from other disciplines, in thinking about using legal skills to add value to entrepreneurial ventures. There is even a growing scholarly literature on the pedagogy of entrepreneurial lawyering.  Our purpose here is to collect in one place resources for use by anyone who is offering a course targeted to law students or lawyers intending to work with entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial enterprises, or venture capitalists.

The resources consist primarily of course materials developed by fellow faculty members. The material in these courses ranges over a number of areas of substantive law and skills training methodologies. Various courses have combined these materials in different ways, ranging from doctrinally-driven classroom courses through full-scale simulations.

These courses in this section of the website are primarily transaction-based, rather than litigation-based. This section does not include standard substantive law courses, like the basic courses in contracts, business organizations, or intellectual property law. Clinical courses, in which there is live client representation, are covered in other sections of this website. However the seminar portions of many clinics contain highly relevant readings and conceptual focus. Several examples of such syllabi have been included here.

The courses included in this section represent examples of the main types of courses designed to teach the representation of entrepreneurs: clinic seminars, “life cycle” courses, simulation courses, “deals” courses, and law & business courses. In addition, there is a section on “Instructors Notes” which provides some helpful examples of specific exercises or classroom discussions.