by Gerald de Jaager

Elizabeth Milnikel has enjoyed a great deal of success in her life. After graduating magna cum laude from Yale and then—magna cum laude again—from the University of Michigan Law School (where she was managing editor of the Michigan Law Review), she clerked for First Circuit Judge Bruce Selya before joining Sidley Austin Brown & Wood, where she built a reputation as a superb practitioner of intellectual property law.

That kind of career trajectory might be the envy of many in the legal profession, but it wasn’t quite enough for Milnikel. Even though she performed enough pro bono work at Sidley to be honored by that firm for her contributions, her yen for public-interest law wasn’t really satisfied.

When she saw an announcement for the assistant director’s position at the Institute for Justice Clinic on Entrepreneurship, she said, "It seemed too good to be true: an opportunity for me to do public-interest law and maintain my engagement with intellectual property issues." She applied, won the position, and started work as assistant to then-clinic director Joseph Holt in 2003.

When Holt departed, Milnikel became acting director of the clinic and then was appointed its director. She doesn’t plan major changes to the program that now hosts more students and serves more entrepreneurs than ever, saying she primarily wants to build on the foundation created by Holt and by Patricia Lee, who led the clinic from its creation in 1997 until 2003.

She has introduced initiatives to extend the clinic’s reach by providing information to aspiring entrepreneurs in addition to clinic clients through workshops, pamphlets, and other forms of outreach such as networking events. Workshops offered so far have covered business planning, choosing an organization form, and other topics; thepamphlets now being created by clinic students address, among other things, the legal do’s and don’ts of hiring practices.

"The need is great," Milnikel said, "and our ability to directly serve more than a relative few of all the deserving entrepreneurs in this community is limited, so I wanted to undertake some things that would benefit a wider audience."

The clinic’s students, Milnikel reports, also gain in distinctive ways from the addition of more general outreach to their direct client responsibilities. Writing a succinct pamphlet about a key legal issue or teaching a focused workshop requires not just knowing the central material but presenting it concisely in terms that are understandable to a general audience. That discipline, Milnikel said, helps students cement their own understanding of the clinic’s subject matter and become better at skillfully communicating their knowledge.

Stepping into Milnikel’s former role as assistant director of the clinic is Praveen Kosuri, whose background seems to suit him ideally for his new responsibilities. After graduating from Washington University School of Law in 1994,hejoined the office of the Cook County Public Defender, where he served for six years. Then he went to the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, earning an MBA in 2001 before going to work at Credit Suisse First Boston as an investment banker. From there he became an associate at Krasnow Saunders Cornblath, the Chicago boutique law firm serving businesses with transactional matters and complex commercial litigation.

While he was at Krasnow Saunders he also taught one night a week at Northwestern Law School, and he said that despite his enjoyment of his firm responsibilities, that one night of teaching always left him feeling more deeply satisfied and energized than his daily duties. With Milnikel, he now teaches the Law School course, "Entrepreneurship and the Law," and like Milnikel he finds himself intensely satisfied by the job he’s taken on: "I hadn't imagined that a job could feel like such an ideal fit, combining so many of my interests and commitments. I didn’t know what I'd been missing until I started here," he said.

The satisfactions that so powerfully motivate Milnikel and Kosuri derive as much from interactions with the clinic's clients as from their interests in the clinic’s subject matter and their commitments to serving the clinic’s students. As Milnikel described it: "Our clients are often remarkable, inspiring people for whom assistance is too scarce. Providing at least some of the help they need to overcome the many barriers they face is very gratifying, and seeing their successes fuels us even more. What we're doing here is good for them, it's good for society—and it’s good for us, too: I think we are better people for knowing them."