Fordham Law is seeking to hire a Senior Director to oversee its Entrepreneurial Law Program and supervise an innovative new Entrepreneurial Law Clinic (ELC).
In the past decade, New York City has become a significant national locus for entrepreneurship, with the scale of activity accelerating. Start-up companies in the region are capitalizing on the city’s concentration of finance, professional services, media, entertainment, and fashion, as well as a burgeoning “maker” community, among other sectors. Social entrepreneurship as well as entrepreneurship in low-income communities are also important parts of the burgeoning New York ecosystem.
In recognition of this growing trend, Fordham Law School has built a focused entrepreneurial law curriculum, leveraging the school’s core strengths in business, corporate, and finance, as well as intellectual property, information law, and technology. The curriculum now includes courses on representing start-up companies, the law of venture capital, and IP transactions in later-stage companies, among others. At the same time, the Law School has been developing a larger program focused on entrepreneurship, with an alumni Entrepreneurial Law Advisory Committee, a popular student Entrepreneurial Law Society, and public programming under the auspices of the school’s Corporate Law Center. The Law School’s entrepreneurial law program is part of a university-wide interdisciplinary effort that includes Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business, Fordham’s Urban Studies Program, and others.
The Law School now seeks to significantly elevate this effort—and fill an important curricular need—through the hiring of a Senior Director.
The primary responsibility of the Senior Director will be to help establish and teach the ELC, supervising students in providing pro bono legal services to early-stage start-up companies. The specific legal questions any given client could present might range from issues of corporate law to IP and licensing, to tax and employment, as well as finance. Matters could include entity formation, drafting shareholder and operating agreements, negotiating investment or loan agreements, advising on how to structure internal compensation structures for founders, drafting vendor or services agreements, and many other basic legal needs for start-up companies. Representing a mix of traditional start-ups as well as social enterprises, ELC students will be exposed to individual transactional questions and the role of in-house counsel dealing with a range of legal issues that interrelate with business objectives and the attendant representational and ethical concerns those intertwined issues raise.
Additionally, the ELC can provide an opportunity for interdisciplinary education, potentially drawing on graduate students from Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business to help clients develop business plans, conduct market research, explore financing options, establish basic accounting structures, and bring their expertise to bear in other ways. Working with the Senior Director, the ELC will also be designed to draw on a network of cooperating attorneys to provide additional mentoring and specialized advice to the ELC and its clients.
The ELC will be housed in Lincoln Square Legal Services, Inc. (LSLS), Fordham’s in-house law firm. LSLS has a staff of fourteen attorneys and a number of other professionals working across ten practice areas that include community economic development, consumer protection, civil rights, criminal defense, family advocacy, federal tax, immigrant rights, intellectual property and information law, legislative and policy advocacy, and securities law. ELC will find synergies across a number of the firm’s other practice areas.
Beyond clinical supervision, the Senior Director will also work to extend the Law School’s visibility and impact among entrepreneurs and the larger Fordham community. Helping to build the entrepreneurial law program will include forging partnerships with incubators, accelerators, venture capital firms, and others working in New York’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. In addition, the Senior Director will help develop public programming on entrepreneurship and the law, work with the student Entrepreneurial Law Society, and take other steps to elevate this important part of Fordham’s mission. In short, the Senior Director will need to be both an educator of entrepreneurship in action and an entrepreneur themselves to unlock the potential of this growing program.
Review of applications will begin immediately and the position will remain open until filled.
Qualifications:
- JD or equivalent degree;
- Five years of demonstrated experience working with start-up companies or related experience at the intersection of legal practice and entrepreneurship; and
- Excellent organizational and communication skills.
Salary will be commensurate with experience.
Please send a cover letter and resume to Darin Neely, Assistant Dean, Office of Administration, Fordham University School of Law, dneely@law.fordham.edu. Please, no calls. For questions about the position, please contact Nestor Davidson, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Fordham University School of Law, ndavidson@law.fordham.edu.
Fordham University is committed to excellence through diversity and welcomes candidates of all backgrounds. Fordham Law School is an Equal Opportunity employer.