Founded in 2009, the Kirkland & Ellis Corporate Lab (the “Lab”) provides students with “real-world” experience and context to prepare them to become well-rounded attorneys with sound knowledge and judgment. Clinical Professor David Zarfes is Director of Corporate Lab Programs. Other leaders in the program include: Clinical Professor Josh Avratin; Lecturer in Law Sean Z. Kramer; and special advisors Lecture in Law Andrew S. Boutros and Lecturer in Law Jason Sussman. Below are the Clinic's significant achievements for 2024-25.

Lab students undertake a wide variety of assignments from the legal and business teams of significant publicly traded and privately held corporations, many of which are household names.  Through this work and through classroom instruction, students in the Lab acquire the necessary legal and interpersonal skills and knowledge to excel in their future legal practice. 

The Lab was proud to be recognized in the Spring 2025 edition of the University of Chicago Law School Record. In an interview featured in “Celebrating Ten Years of Rubenstein Scholars” by Nadia Alfadel Coloma, Assistant General Counsel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Eric Lewin ’17 highlighted his work at the Lab as a formative experience in his legal education. Lewin noted that:

“[T]he Corporate Lab with Professors Zarfes and Avratin was a crash course in working with clients and as part of a legal team—critical skills I use daily that can be hard to build in school.”

During the 2024-2025 academic year, Lab students successfully completed in excess of 100 projects for more than 30 largely publicly traded companies across a wide range of legal disciplines—e.g., contract drafting and corporate transactions, labor and employment, intellectual property and copyright, artificial intelligence, litigation risk assessment, and legal research. Representative examples include the following: 

Contract Drafting and Corporate Transactions

• Preparation of license and consulting agreements for a multinational technology company;
• Preparation of an agreement for the sale of developmental products for a multinational manufacturing company;
• Memorandum for a multinational informational technology infrastructure services provider regarding caps on liability for gross negligence and willful misconduct in commercial transactions in seven states;
• Completion of a commercial contract and non-disclosure agreement contract drafting playbook for a global fast food restaurant chain;
• Research memorandum for a manufacturing company analyzing its competitor products’ warranty clauses and proposing adjustments to the company’s own warranty clauses;
• Drafting of a sales contract and manufacturing supply agreement for a cannabis company; and
• Drafting of a wellness room policy for a management consulting firm.

Labor and Employment

• Detailed survey for a national sporting goods chain of notice of separation requirements in forty-seven states and under two federal laws;
• Memorandums for a finance career advancement nonprofit on hiring a temporary chief of staff, releasing an at-will employee, modifying its paid-time off policy, changes to Illinois employment law, and risks and best practices associated with providing employment references;
• Memorandum for a management consulting firm analyzing industry best practices for employee travel risk management policies; and
• Memorandum for a transportation and logistics company outlining the legal frameworks governing when an employer can remove a dangerous driver from duty.

Intellectual Property and Copyright

• Memorandum for a global management consulting firm summarizing lawsuits against an energy company for misappropriating trade secrets, as well as insights and recommendations for the firm to incorporate in its trade secret misappropriation education based thereon;
• Research memorandums for a sports talent agency analyzing regulations in all fifty states relating to the compensation of student-athletes for their name, image, and likeness and evaluating potential legal claims to pursue in relation to an artwork made without the featured athlete’s authorization; and
• Memorandum for a luxury goods group reviewing major trademark statutory damages cases.

Litigation Risk Assessment

• Memorandum for a health care company assessing the legal risk of its diversity, equity, and inclusion program;
• Memorandum for a maritime recreation company assessing potential liability exposure arising from a recent acquisition; and
• Presentation to the legal department of a health care company on the increasing risk of board litigation.

Artificial Intelligence

• Research memorandums for a multinational technology company analyzing state, federal, and European regulations affecting AI red-teaming and technical documentation requirements for AI models;
• Memorandum for a supercenter chain evaluating compliance risks for a proposed AI-driven tool;
• Research memorandums for a multinational technology company analyzing state and international regulations regarding web crawling and data scraping; and
• Memorandum for a manufacturing company assessing the accuracy and reliability of AI-generated legal analyses.

Additional Legal Research

• Research memorandum for a multinational computer and information technology company on corporate sustainability laws and regulations;
• Research memorandum for a carbon credits vendor on the regulatory landscape of the voluntary carbon market;
• Research memorandum for a multinational corporation analyzing cybersecurity regulations in the European Union and the United States and their impact on large-scale cloud service providers;
• Research memorandum and presentation to a global footwear and apparel retailer on recent trends in the laws relating to minimum advertised price policies;
• Presentation to the Chief Compliance Officer and Assistant General Counsel of a healthcare company addressing data privacy laws in the United States, the European Union, and China;
• Research memorandum for a sporting goods chain on laws in hundreds of states and localities restricting the sale, possession, and carrying of throwing knives, automatic switchblades, and throwing stars;
• Research memorandum to a luxury products group reviewing the current state and history of criminal and civil counterfeit law in the United States;
• Research memorandums for an insurance company analyzing anti-money laundering red flags and the Department of Justice’s corporate compliance guidelines;
• Research memorandum for the knowledge management team of a law firm surveying merger statutes in all fifty states; and
• Presentation to a health care company on tariff fundamentals, business impact, and mitigation strategies.

Included in the Lab’s client roster are the following:

• 3M
• Academy Sports
• Accenture
• Arc Health
• Barilla
• Bloomberg
• Brunswick
• Curia
• Google
• IBM
• Intact Insurance
• Jones Lang LaSalle
• Kearney
• Kirkland & Ellis
• Koch Industries
• Kraft Heinz
• Kyndryl
• LVMH
• Mark Jacobs
• McDonald’s
• Meijer
• Nike
• Okta
• Owens Corning
• Schneider National
• Solventum
• Sony
• The Motley Fool
• Vayner Sports
• Verizon
• WEC Energy Group
• YWCA

The Lab also worked with more than fifteen entrepreneurs on an individual basis and through an ongoing collaboration with the Booth School’s New Venture Challenge and Social New Venture Challenge.  Specific assignments included the following: