More free legal counsel: Get your patent filed by Penn law students

Locking down an idea as intellectual property can be a gamechanger early in the game.

From licensing deals to trademarking, law students from the University of Pennsylvania offer Philly startups help in the often tricky legal vertical of intellectual property through the Detkin Intellectual Property and Technology Legal Clinic headed by attorney and professor Cynthia Dahl.

Dahl emailed us to say that the application process for the sought-after services is live after spotting our article on Steve Rosard’s similar effort at Drexel University.

“We are a little different from Steve’s clinic in that we specialize in intellectual property issues like patents, copyrights and trademarks),” Dahl wrote. She also pointed us to Villanova’s Clinic for Law and Entrepreneurship.

Here’s Dahl herself explaining the Clinic’s purpose:

(Related: last year Penn had its biggest year yet for patent filings. Laurie Actman, from the Penn Center for Innovation, told us why here.)

Additionally, Dahl runs Penn’s Entrepreneurship Legal Clinic, much in the same vein as Drexel’s program. The idea: Penn’s law students pitch in to help early-stage startups without significant investment navigate the intricacies of business law.