Law
Arts and Humanities
The Business/Law Exchange™
The McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship and the James E. Rogers College of Law have partnered to create The University of Arizona’s Business/Law Exchange, one of the premier interdisciplinary collaborations in the nation. The Exchange increases the knowledge, understanding, and learning opportunities of issues of business and law, and particularly at the intersection of entrepreneurship and law. The primary program of the exchange is the Mock Law Firm, which creates a study environment where students of law and of entrepreneurship engage one another in a realistic duplication of real world new venture issues. Other Law Exchange activities include guest speaker series, colloquia, new course offerings, fellowships, research support, and others.
Mock Law Firm
Tucson attorney Lawrence Hecker, an adjunct practitioner faculty member with Arizona Law, leads the Mock Law Firm course. This program uniquely advances a university entrepreneurship environment to create a dynamic, yet highly scalable and transferable model for learning and teaching among both entrepreneurship and law students focusing on innovation related practice. This partnership of the colleges of law and business will create a mock law firm environment, with new venture entrepreneurship teams serving as the mock law firm’s client pool. The two groups learn from one another key the skills and knowledge to make them successful in their chosen fields. The relevance of this pedagogy in the 21st century knowledge economy is considerable.
Unlike law clinics, which limit on-on-one engagement among law students and clients, mock law firm students engage with new/nascent level firms from the earliest business development phase and through innovation exploration and actual venture planning, development, funding applications, and launch. In an experiential learning capacity, law students gain knowledge of the needs and challenges of entrepreneurial firms at all phases, adding significant value to the education of students in specialties ranging from patent to corporate law.
Entrepreneurship students likewise receive valuable information and experience at the earliest stages of concept exploration, allowing them to better assess the potential of new knowledge-sets, as well as to engage with the legal community on an ongoing basis and to include legal issues and considerations in strategy and operations/management phases. Traditional law/legal adjunct models of entrepreneurship education have positioned faculty/adjuncts to bring in legal assistance when warranted, but do not provide ongoing engagement through all phases. Other difficulties exist in duplicating a real world exposure to legal counsel within entrepreneurship studies. This approach provides the best of both worlds for these two student groups.
Study Program
Elective Courses
- Principles of Entrepreneurship
- Innovation Principles and Environments
- View all courses
Scholarships
- McGuire Entrepreneurship Program scholarships
- UA scholarships
- UA financial aid
- Lawrence Hecker Scholarship
Research
Resources
How to Apply
For additional information, please contact us.
