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Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Clinical legal education

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Risks, Goals, And Pictographs: Lawyering To The Social Entrepreneur, Alicia E. Plerhoples Mar 2015

Risks, Goals, And Pictographs: Lawyering To The Social Entrepreneur, Alicia E. Plerhoples

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Scholars have argued that transactional lawyers add value by mitigating the potential for post-transaction litigation, reducing transaction costs, acting as reputational intermediaries, and lowering regulatory costs. Effective transactional attorneys understand their clients’ businesses and the industries or contexts in which those businesses operate. Applied to the start-up social enterprise context, understanding the client includes understanding the founders’ values, preferences, and proclivity for risk. The novel transactions and innovative solutions pursued by emerging social entrepreneurs may not lend themselves well to risk avoidance. For example, new corporate forms such as the benefit corporation are untested, yet appeal to many social entrepreneurs …


Clinical Collaborations: Going Global To Advance Social Entrepreneurship, Deborah Burand, Susan R. Jones, Jonathan Ng, Alicia E. Plerhoples Jan 2014

Clinical Collaborations: Going Global To Advance Social Entrepreneurship, Deborah Burand, Susan R. Jones, Jonathan Ng, Alicia E. Plerhoples

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the summer of 2012, transactional law clinics from three U.S. law schools: George Washington University; Georgetown University; and the University of Michigan launched a collaboration to serve a common client—Ashoka, a global nonprofit organization that supports close to 3,000 social entrepreneurs across 76 countries. While clinic collaborations within universities happen occasionally, clinic collaborations across universities are unusual. This essay focuses on the motivations, operations, lessons, and next steps of this cross-university, clinical collaboration aimed at advancing social entrepreneurship globally. Specifically, this essay examines why the collaboration was launched, how the collaboration is structured, what the collaboration offers clients and …


Representing Social Enterprise, Alicia E. Plerhoples Jan 2013

Representing Social Enterprise, Alicia E. Plerhoples

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article explores the representation of social enterprises—i.e., nonprofit and for-profit organizations whose managersstrategically and purposefully work to create social, environmental, and economic value or achieve a social good through the use of business techniques—in the Social Enterprise & Nonprofit Law Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center. Representation of social enterprises helps create a dynamic curriculum through which law students learn to merge corporate legal theory with transactional law practice. Through service to social enterprises, law students (i) learn about corporate governance and corporate legal theory as well as business models and mechanisms that support social and environmental value creation …