Last November, UV featured an opinion piece written by Laura McGee advocating for a business law clinic at the U of T Faculty of Law. McGee argued that law student volunteers at a business law clinic would be able to service entrepreneurs and small businesses that are in need of legal services but unable to afford it. She proposed a win-win scenario: the clinic would provide (1) students with business law experience under the guidance of lawyer mentors, and (2) local small businesses with access to sound legal advice. Since then McGee has teamed up with Hani Migally, Dan Everall and Jeffrey Ma to continue to push for greater practical business law education at the faculty.
The faculty used to have a business law clinic called Enterprise Legal Services. In a meeting between faculty and the aforementioned students, Assistant Dean Faherty mentioned that the clinic had not been very successful. Having said that, neither Assistant Dean Faherty nor Associate Dean Alarie were opposed to there being such a clinic. McGee and her fellow interested students did some research and claim that many of the failures of Enterprise Legal Services were the result of poor communication between student volunteers and clients, and that the business law clinics at other Ontario law schools have managed to overcome these same problems. Since then, the team’s research has been driven towards landing a concrete proposal for a business law clinic at UofT Law.
“We looked at several different models for student business law clinics in both Canada and the U.S. We concluded that in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, and cost, Osgoode’s model is the way to move forward,” said McGee. Osgoode Hall Law School is partnered with the law firm Stikeman Elliott, which provides training, resources, and a team of lawyers to mentor and supervise law students. McGee and her colleagues have since met and worked with a major downtown law firm that was enthusiastic about partnering with students and faculty on a pilot project. The details of such an arrangement are still in the works. McGee claims that such an arrangement would require very few resources from the faculty.
The push for a student business law clinic is gaining steam – a petition supporting such a program was signed by over 200 students in only two days. In a subsequent meeting with Associate Dean Lee, who is also generally supportive of a business law clinic, two major potential roadblocks were identified: (1) cost and (2) the process of creating a new legal clinic. With respect to the first issue, McGee believes that most of the costs would be absorbed by the partner law firm. The only major outstanding cost for the faculty would be to hire an adjunct professor to manage the clinic. McGee is concerned, on the other hand, with the project maintaining enough momentum to actualize. “This is obviously a pretty major proposal,” she conceded. “It would really benefit from faculty support to make sure it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle. We’re currently setting up meetings with a few faculty members we think might be especially interested. Hopefully they will be able to give us some advice on how to get the clinic off the ground.”
Correction – In the original article, we mistakenly wrote that the business law clinic was a part of Downtown Legal Services. It was never a part of DLS. We apologize for the error.
