Small Business Clinic

Students in the Small Business Clinic develop transactional and business lawyering skills while representing small businesses, cooperatives, community-based enterprises, food businesses, small nonprofits, and artists in the Greater Baltimore region that cannot afford, or otherwise lack access to, transactional legal services. Because the clinic approaches this representation through a community economic development framework, it focuses on enterprises that build wealth, expand economic opportunity, and strengthen the neighborhoods in which they operate. This single-semester, six-credit clinic satisfies both the Cardin requirement and the experiential learning requirement for the Business Law track.

Student attorneys work in teams. Our practice group engages in community lawyering, which seeks to organize and empower communities and community-based organizations by utilizing a wide range of legal tools. The client work focuses on legal/practical matters of concern to neighborhoods, organizations, and small businesses that lack access to needed legal services.

Student attorneys work in teams, under faculty supervision, to help clients establish, operate, and sustain their enterprises. Student work may include:

Advising start-up and established enterprises, including cooperatives and social enterprises, on their legal needs from pre-launch planning and formation through growth, succession planning, and wind-down;

Counseling clients on choice of entity and drafting formation and governance documents, including articles of organization or incorporation, operating agreements, bylaws, partnership agreements, and cooperative member agreements;

Assisting small nonprofits with formation, governance, and fiscal sponsorship arrangements, and preparing applications for tax-exempt status;

Supporting food economy clients with cottage food and home-kitchen licensing, health department permits, commissary and shared-kitchen agreements, vendor and farmers market arrangements, and land access for urban agriculture;

Counseling clients on business licenses, permits, zoning, and the annual filings and compliance obligations required to remain in good standing;

Drafting, reviewing, and negotiating contracts; and

Designing and delivering community legal education workshops for entrepreneurs and community partners on legal issues common to small enterprises.

Through this work, students develop core skills for business and transactional practice, including client interviewing and counseling, negotiation, problem-solving, legal research, and legal drafting. Students also learn sound law practice management, gain familiarity with the rules of professional conduct governing lawyers, and collaborate with other professionals, including accountants, business consultants, and community development practitioners.

The seminar integrates legal doctrine, policy, and practical lawyering skills in support of students’ client work. It develops a framework for understanding the legal, economic, and social dimensions of community economic development, and it also functions as a collaborative law practice in which students conduct case rounds, work through practice dilemmas, exchange peer feedback, and apply substantive law to ongoing client matters.

Time commitments: Student attorneys are expected to devote an average of 21 hours per week to clinic work. In addition to meeting weekly as a team, each team meets weekly with its faculty supervisor to discuss the practical, theoretical, and ethical dimensions of the representation. Clinic hours include the weekly seminar session, seminar preparation and assignments, team meetings, supervision meetings, and all client work, including research, analysis, drafting, and client communications. Students must attend the in-person clinic orientation as well as a separate three-hour Small Business Clinic orientation.

Pre-Requisites/Co-Requisites: Business Associations is a prerequisite or co-requisite for this clinic. Prior experience or coursework in small business and entrepreneurship, social and community-based enterprise, food and agricultural enterprise, or taxation is helpful but not required.