UR clinic helps businesses navigate the legal maze

The flash of inspiration that leads someone to develop an innovative new product, business or philanthropy is only the start of the battle.

The real sweat and tears often come in trying to turn that idea into reality, including getting patents or trademarks, business licenses or making zoning requests.

Even setting up the legal structure for a business — partnership or sole proprietorship, for example — could be a challenge. Legal costs can be pretty daunting for a small venture.

"How companies spend their precious startup capital is an important consideration," said John Carroll, who directs the intellectual property and transactional law clinic at the University of Richmond's School of Law.

"They need access to options and solutions," said Carroll, an assistant clinical professor of law and a patent attorney. Often, people have great ideas for a business or product, "but they don't know (how) to get off the ground," he said.

The clinic, which opened in early 2010, is staffed by a team of upper-level law students who are trained in intellectual property and business law. They offer free legal services to small businesses, entrepreneurs, or nonprofit organizations that don't have the financial resources to pay major legal fees for intellectual property and transactional work.

"We help step them through that process," Carroll said. "Something else we can help them do is drafting contracts, so they can get out there and start to do business."

* * * * *

One of the clinic's recent clients was Karen Videtic, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University's Department of Fashion Design and Merchandising, and Kristin Caskey, an associate professor there.

The two professors, along with fashion design students, designed the Ask for Comfort colorful line of hospital wear for pediatric cancer patients in 2008. The gowns — they are labeled as comfortable clothing, not pajamas or loungewear, for legal reasons — are distributed to young patients at the VCU Medical Center.

She turned to the clinic for help.

Videtic knew she had some legal issues that needed /to be addressed: Should the business be a nonprofit or a limited liability company, and what should the liability insurance be?

"It was a great opportunity for them to work with us and for us to work with them," she said of UR's clinic. "It helped solve our dilemma."

During one semester, students determined that the VCU professors should create a limited liability corporation — now called Ask for Comfort LLC. In another semester, another group of students from the clinic suggested how much liability insurance to buy.

"It was excellent. They were very thorough," Videtic said. "They looked at many things. They presented us with their research and gave us their opinions. They really made sure they were giving us the information so we could make our decisions."

* * * * *

Hopewell High School teacher Andrei Dacko also sought assistance in turning an innovative idea into a marketable product.

In 2010, Dacko and 10 students in his engineering and technology class, working with an engineer, developed and prototyped what Dacko calls "a 21st century desk" — a classroom desk designed to be more ergonomically correct and more functional than traditional desks.

Dacko wanted to get a patent on the design that would be shared by him, the students and their outside adviser. Some pro bono help from a lawyer got them nowhere, and paid legal assistance was out of the question.

"Because we were a group of kids and a teacher, we didn't have the financial means to do that," Dacko said.

Some further research led Dacko to the intellectual property and transactional law clinic.

* * * * *

Dacko and the VCU professors are exactly the type of client the law clinic looks for — local, with an innovative idea, lacking in substantial financial resources and offering an interesting case from which the law students can learn.

"Our target market is clients who are stuck," said Carroll, who also has an engineering degree from Virginia Tech. "These are clients who are not going to be candidates for traditional law firms. We want to help them get unstuck. We have students who need to learn how to do this work."

Students have been literally lining up to enroll in Carroll's law clinic course, which is offered every semester, but only eight get into the class. This fall, the lucky ones include third-year law students Chris Mackenzie from Newport News and Connellee Armentrout from Roanoke.

They spend at least 24 hours per week doing legal work for the clients the law clinic has accepted, in addition to their other law school courses.

They work under the supervision of Carroll, who must review and approve any legal advice before they give it.

Even the clinic has to make choices about whom to help — it gets more requests for assistance than the students have time to fulfill.

Since it opened in January 2010, the clinic has provided more than $750,000 worth of free legal services, Carroll said.

"There are a lot of potential clients out there who otherwise might not be able to afford legal services," Mackenzie said, adding that the clinic prefers to take clients from the Richmond area.

One of the goals is to get small businesses started on the right foot. A company might run into more expenses later if it goes to market without having the best legal structure, or without protecting its trademarks and products.

"If they come to us, we can potentially stave off a lot of downstream expenses," Mackenzie said. "One of the things we can do to help small businesses is get them structured and protected appropriately right off the bat."

In just a few months of working in the clinic, Armentrout said he has gained a lot of practical knowledge about what lawyers do.

"It just feels more meaningful to be working for actual clients," he said. "I take a lot of ownership over the work I do when I know there is a real person on the other side."

* * * * *

John B. Farmer, an intellectual-property lawyer with the Leading-Edge Law Group PLC in Henrico County, said the biggest benefit of the clinic is to the law students who participate.

"It appears that the clinic provides law students the opportunity to get such practice experience before graduating, which should make them more employable and more ready to be productive in practice," he said. "Many clients resist paying for the services of first- or second-year lawyers because they lack practical experience. Programs such as this can help overcome that problem."

But Farmer also said that businesses who are thinking about using the clinic need to beware.

"Because legal services are expensive, I'm sure many businesses would love to get free legal services," he said. "Yet, whenever the quality of the lawyer may determine the quality of the legal outcome (which is nearly always), a potential client needs to do his homework to make certain he is hiring a lawyer of sufficient quality for the task."

Of course, he said, this admonition to be careful with quality applies even when a business owner is paying for legal services.

Farmer said he is somewhat familiar with the clinic and knows and respects Carroll, the clinic's director.

"John is a sharp, capable, experienced and fearless lawyer," Farmer said.

* * * * *

The law clinic also helps nonprofitorganizations.

For example, the clinic helped Joanita Senoga, an immigrant from Uganda who came to the Richmond area in 1996, set up a nonprofit organization to support a school in Uganda, where she had been a teacher. The law clinic prepared her application for nonprofit status in the past year.

"It is amazing how much time they put into it," said Senoga, who works two jobs to support herself and her two children. "If I had to pay someone for that, I would not have been able to do it.

"It was professionally done. That is why it took just a few weeks to get the application back."

Senoga's nonprofit organization, Circle of Peace International, helps support a school in Uganda with 200 underprivileged students It also provides educational opportunities for U.S. students to communicate with and learn from the Ugandan students.

* * * * *

As for Dacko, the intellectual property and transactional law clinic students had some bad news for him: The desk wasn't patentable because too much time had passed since it was first publicized.

The students designed the desk through a grant received from the Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam program offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They showed the desk at the school's EurekaFest program in 2010.

However, Dacko said he is working on an improved design that might be patentable. He also is working to establish a nonprofit organization, The Lemonade Stand, that will help support other engineering programs for high school students.

Dacko is getting legal assistance from the law clinic to do that. "I hope to continue that relationship," he said.