Cornell Law School is set to launch its first law clinic in the Big Apple.
Beginning in January 2025, the Entrepreneurship Law Clinic will expand from Ithaca to the Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island.
Through the Entrepreneurship Law Clinic, law students provide pro-bono legal services to emerging businesses, entrepreneurs and startups in the Ithaca area and under the guidance of law school faculty.
Students assist with business formation, hiring and employment, intellectual property management, commercial contracts and public service initiatives, such as aiding small businesses during COVID-19.
All of the law school’s other clinics are located in Ithaca, where the law school is based.
Established in 2018, the Entrepreneurship Law Clinic stands as the law school’s only transactional clinic, which means students gain hands-on legal experience in business.
The law school received a donation from Franci Blassberg ’75 J.D. ’77 and Joseph Rice III in 2023, which helped establish the Blassberg-Rice Center for Entrepreneurship Law. The center will use the funding to expand the Entrepreneurship Law Clinic to New York City.
Prof. Celia Bigoness, law, is the founding director of the Blassberg-Rice Center and the Entrepreneurship Law Clinic. Bigoness emphasized the benefits of the new location.
“Law clinics serve two principal purposes, and our expansion to NYC serves both purposes … — providing pro-bono legal services and hands-on clinical training experience for students,” Bigoness stated to The Sun.
“The clinic has been hugely successful — so successful that its capacity isn’t nearly enough to satisfy student demand,” Cornell Law Dean Jens David Ohlin wrote to The Sun. “This expansion will allow us to scale the program while keeping the intensive, hands-on approach that makes it so effective.”
Law students may join the clinic in their second or third years and often stay for the remainder of their degrees.
Kathleen Joo J.D. ’23, participated in the Entrepreneurship Law Clinic in her second and third years of law school and is now an associate at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP. She believes that the expansion will advance the clinic.
“While I was a student there, … [the clinic] was the closest experience we could get to full-time work,” Joo said. “I imagine the expansion also means that students will get access to a greater variety of clients and projects.”
With this development, students will also be able to spend a semester at Cornell Tech with the J.D. Program in Information and Technology Law.
The law school also hired its second full-time clinical instructor to facilitate the expansion.
Prof. David Reiss joined the law school in July and is the research director of the Blassberg-Rice Center for Entrepreneurship Law. He will teach at the clinic’s New York City location and Bigoness will continue teaching at its Ithaca location.
Reiss previously taught at Brooklyn Law School where he founded its Community Development Clinic. He explained that he is enthusiastic to apply his experiences to the clinic.
“I have represented entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs over the course of my legal career, first in practice and then as a director of a law clinic, and can’t wait to get started at the [Cornell] Tech campus,” Reiss said.