Becoming an Innovation Clinic Client
Working With Us
The first step in becoming a client of the Innovation Clinic is to contact its director, Emily Underwood, at underwood@uchicago.edu to set a time to discuss your legal needs, your startup or venture capital firm, and whether you and your needs are a fit with the Innovation Clinic. During that call, we will also discuss the information on this site to ensure that you understand and have no questions.
After our call, if you decide to proceed, you send an email to Emily Underwood with a two to three sentence description of your startup or venture capital firm that you are comfortable distributing to Innovation Clinic students on a non-confidential basis and a bullet point list of projects on which you would like assistance. You will get a response within a few days to confirm whether each of those projects is eligible for consideration. You will get a response once we complete our staffing procedures for the relevant quarter to let you know if we were able to accept any of your matters and if so, which ones.
While we are always open for intake, the best times to make initial outreach are in mid-February, mid-May, early September, and mid-November. Students tend to complete projects as each academic quarter ends, and so tend to have the most available bandwidth as new academic quarters begin. We will usually let you know whether we are able to take on any of your projects about one month after the times noted above. If we accept your project, you will be asked to sign an engagement letter confirming the scope of our engagement and much of the information on this site.
How We Select Our Projects
Our students are in full control of which projects we select. It is difficult to predict where their interests will lie. During our intake process, we prioritize projects offering the best practical learning experiences for our students, with an eye to taking a variety of projects in any given quarter. We also select projects with bandwidth in mind, ensuring that we have adequate staffing based on the project size to complete it in the client’s desired timeframe.
Note that we do not commit to representing you on any matter until you receive email confirmation from us that the matter has been accepted and soliciting the information necessary for us to conduct a conflicts check. In a typical quarter, we are usually only able to accept 10-15% of the projects that are requested of us.
Learn More
Potential clients interested in working with the Innovation Clinic should contact its director, Emily Underwood, at underwood@uchicago.edu to set a time to discuss.