Mentors Needed

The student Business and Technology Law Clinic is in need of approximately ten mentors for the fall of 2007. We are looking for practicing lawyers in Calgary who have significant business and/or technology law experience. If you are interested in assisting, please call Professor Greg Hagen at 220-4012 or e-mail at ghagen@ucalgary.ca .

The Business & Technology Law Clinic is a project of the Legal Centre for Business & Technology at the University of Calgary Faculty of Law.

The Business and Technology Clinic Program

This fall, students from Professor Yamauchi’s Business Clinical course will have a mandatory pass/fail component for which they must deal with a client issue relating to starting up a business or intellectual property. Professor Hagen will be responsible for administering this component of the course. A similar optional component will be offered in the Intellectual Property survey course.

The students will be placed with a practicing legal Mentor, who will be responsible for supervising their work. Mentors’ duties will include the following:

• supervise two students in their handling of a client matter, including the interview, drafting the reporting letter, research and any documents to be provided to the client;
• be available to meet with student for one meeting at the Law Faculty on a Tuesday evening on a date TBD at which time the students interview the client and to communicate and/or meet with the students as needed after
  that;
• decide on the scope of legal information and/or services that the
  students will provide to the client;
• evaluate the students’ work and provide the completed evaluation forms to
  Greg Hagen; and
• approve any work that goes out to the client.

 

The client interviews will take place on Tuesday evenings after the Business Clinical Course. We would like to assign files during September and October, so that the students can finish them in time for studying for December exams but we cannot anticipate exactly when clients will contact us. We will provide the Mentor with the name of the client as far in advance as possible so that a conflicts search may be done.

Additional Information

The clients have in the past come from a variety of sources, including Business Development West, Momentum’s ABCs of Business, the Calgary Business Information Centre and similar programs. We are leaving it up to the discretion of the Mentor as to what sort of information/services the
student will provide, having regard to degree of difficulty, time required, type of matter and other factors that are relevant. If you are aware of a suitable pro bono client for the clinic, please let me know and we can likely schedule them for a meeting.

The service is completely pro bono. We do not have any client trust accounts and do not deal with money at all. Consequently, any fees that a client may have to pay for registration of documents or any other fee will be paid directly by the client.