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The Small Business Opportunity Center was established to provide second- and third-year students with hands-on business experience. Many of America's leading law schools, including Northwestern, offer students an opportunity to gain practical experience through a variety of clinical programs, but almost all are in the areas of trial and appellate advocacy and other forms of litigation. The SBOC adds a business component to the Northwestern's already nationally-acclaimed clinical programs.

Second- and third-year students who are interested in participating in the SBOC are required to have taken the Law School seminar on Entrepreneurship Law and will have taken an introductory course in corporations or business associations as well.

The SBOC has been of particular interest to students who are pursuing a combined JD/MBA degree from the Law School and from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management.

• Classroom Offerings

Northwestern Law now offers several courses in entrepreneurship and transactional law to its second and third year students and to a limited number of international lawyers who have come to Chicago for a year to obtain an advanced LLM degree from the Law School. The core course, Entrepreneurship Law, is offered each semester to students who have already taken Corporations or Business Associations. Other courses offered on a staggered basis are Financing the Entrepreneurial Venture and Structuring Transactions, each designed to expose students to significant aspects of transactional law. The core course is taught by full-time resident faculty. The others are taught by adjunct professors from the Chicago legal community.

Entrepreneurship Law, a thirteen-week course with a limited enrollment of 30, takes the student for a journey through all aspects of starting up and operating a new venture and representing an entrepreneurial client. In a sense, it covers everything from "advertising to zoning" law. While students are exposed to many entirely new subjects, they are also taught how to put into practice in a business context the theoretical concepts learned in Contracts, Corporations, Federal Tax, Antitrust, Local Government and Employment Law.

• Clinical Component

The clinical component of Northwestern's entrepreneurship and transactional program is known as the Small Business Opportunity Center. The purpose of the SBOC is to give students who have taken Entrepreneurship Law real-life experience handling transactional legal problems and to provide much needed assistance to business owners and social entrepreneurs in the Chicago metropolitan area. In its first eight years of operation, more than 1,500 potential clients have come to the SBOC for legal assistance and almost 500 have been served. These include web site designers, consulting engineers, inventors, manufacturers and sellers of wearing apparel and other products, musical groups, and persons interested in establishing nonprofit organizations. Almost fifty percent are women or members of minority groups.

Clients who are accepted from the SBOC's long waiting list are required to sign a formal engagement letter and are charged modest fees ranging from $100 to $1,500 per client depending on the amount of work the SBOC is asked to undertake. The most common assignments involve the establishment of an appropriate business entity, searching and registering trade names, confidentiality and employment contracts, reviewing commercial leases and, in the case of nonprofit organizations, the preparation and handling of applications for tax-exempt status. Several clients have reached the venture capital stage of financing.

Student Work Assignments

Client work is done by SBOC student participants under the close supervision of a faculty member with substantial experience in private law practice. No litigation or contested proceedings are handled. The program is operated in the same way as in a corporate law firm: the student participant and a faculty supervisor meet together with the new client; both ask questions about the proposed venture or legal problem facing the client; both prepare notes of the meeting. Following the meeting, the student drafts a letter to the client summarizing the points discussed at the initial conference and estimating SBOC fees and official charges. The letter is then reviewed by the faculty supervisor and is sent to the client over the student's name with a copy to the supervisor. If the client elects to have the SBOC undertake one or more of the items outlined in the first letter, the student does all of the required research and drafting under faculty guidance and supervision. When the engagement is complete, the student prepares a statement for services and expenses and a letter transmitting it to the client. Once a week all student participants and faculty supervisors meet as a group to review the accomplishments and challenges of the prior week and to discuss matters of common interest.

Three full-time faculty members, who also have classroom teaching and other responsibilities, have been able to supervise eighteen SBOC student participants per semester, each student with three or four clients for whom he or she has primary responsibility. This means that the SBOC has an active case load of approximately 80 clients each semester, some of whom are long time clients that the SBOC has represented for a year or more.

SBOC student participants, who generally remain in the clinic for two semesters, are graded on the quality of their work and on the amount of responsibility they assume for meeting clients' needs. Students receive either three or four credit hours depending on whether they are participating in the clinic for their first or second semester.