Startups, apply for free legal help from Penn & Drexel

Get free legal help from local law students.

Both Penn and Drexel have law clinics that are currently looking to work with startups and tech businesses.

Drexel’s Entrepreneurial Law Clinic, which only accepts early-stage startups without any significant investment, takes on four companies as clients and provides business law help. Penn’s Detkin Intellectual Property and Technology Legal Clinic, which focuses on intellectual property issues for both startups and non-startups, takes about 12 companies or clients.

Apply to be a Drexel legal client here. Apply to be a Penn legal client here.

It might be free legal help from students, but don’t underestimate it: one former Drexel Entrepreneurial Law client, CommonBond, ended up hiring the Drexel law student it worked with as its corporate counsel last year, said Steven Rosard, the former attorney for Safeguard Scientifics that now leads the two-year-old Drexel clinic. The clinic can help with tasks like incorporation, forming an LLC and setting up equity arrangements for founders, Rosard said.

Launched last year, Penn’s clinic will most be able to help “businesses with ripe intellectual property issues gating their business progress,” said Cynthia Dahl, who runs the clinic. Dahl said the clinic can help with:

• drafting and negotiating licenses
• NDAs and other agreements
• prior art and freedom to operate searching
• general IP audits and counseling
• trademarking and branding strategy
• copyright counseling
• addressing website issues (like using third party content, and setting privacy and terms of use policies)