Entrepreneurial Law
Sharpen your analysis and strengthen your entrepreneurial legal skills in the Entrepreneurial Law Clinic (the "ELC").
In the ELC, you will work on a wide variety of legal matters through your representation of mission-driven enterprises, including early-stage start-ups, social enterprises, and low-income small businesses, along with the nonprofits that support the entrepreneurial community.
As a student attorney in the ELC, you will provide corporate and transactional legal services to your clients, advise through limited-scope consultations, and participate in community outreach work to educate entrepreneurs about common legal issues.
Practicing in the New York Metropolitan area, where the entrepreneurial spirit exists on every street corner, you will work with clients to select and form legal entities, restructure existing businesses to promote growth, draft privacy policies and terms of service, protect clients’ intellectual property rights, and help clients build their workforce, and draft shareholder, operating, vendor, customer, lease and/or employment agreements, while also creating accessible guidance and legal tools in order to leverage your skills for the broader NYC entrepreneurial community.
The work is detail-oriented, demanding, and extremely important for our clients. It will also give you a solid practice foundation as you move toward launching your career as an attorney.
Whether you take this clinic because you want to pursue corporate and transactional practice or you wish to improve your critical thinking and client relationship skills –significant dividends will be yours throughout your legal career.
It will provide important, practical opportunities for law and business students to learn about entrepreneurship—and how the tools of entrepreneurship can advance social justice.
Matthew Diller, Dean Emeritus, Fordham Law School
From 2017 to 2024, Fordham’s Entrepreneurial Law Clinic hosted a periodic podcast focusing on cutting-edge topics within the entrepreneurial legal space. This site is home to the full archive of those episodes. Enjoy!
Also available on Apple Podcast and Spotify.
Katherine Hughes, Entrepreneurial Law Clinic, Clinical Professor of Law
Katherine Hughes is a Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Entrepreneurial Law Clinic at Fordham Law School. She previously served as global pro bono counsel and director of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton’s pro bono program, as general counsel of a risk management nonprofit supporting the nation's largest provider of reproductive healthcare services, and as a debt finance and bank regulatory associate at Cleary Gottlieb.
Professor Hughes is a leader in nonprofit, small business, and social enterprise law in New York City. She has served as co-chair of the New York City Bar Association’s Not-for-Profit Organizations Committee and as a program committee member for NYU’s Grunin Center conference on Legal Issues in Social Entrepreneurship and Impact Investing and is a member of the City Bar's Emerging Companies / Venture Capital Committee. She has been recognized by Lawyers Alliance for New York and named a Trailblazer by The New York Law Journal for her pro bono work on behalf of nonprofit and mission-driven organizations.
Prior to joining the full-time faculty, Professor Hughes taught for many years in Fordham’s Community Economic Development Clinic and legal writing program. She also clerked for Judge Paul J. Kelly, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. A graduate of Fordham Law School, she was editor-in-chief of the Fordham Law Review and received the Joseph R. Crowley Award, the Archibald R. Murray Public Service Award, and the Fordham Law School prize for the highest GPA in her first-year section. Professor Hughes also holds an M.A. in international political economy and development from Fordham, an M.Sc. in race and ethnic relations from the University of London, and a B.F.A. from Emerson College.