Professors help students build client skills
“THROUGHOUT MY WHOLE CAREER, I’ve wanted to help people create health, wealth, and happiness in their communities,” says Professor Patricia H. Lee, co-director of the Business Law Clinic and executive director of the Business Law Center.
Lee, who is also Loyola’s Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Professor of Business Law, joined the School of Law in fall 2019 from Saint Louis University (SLU) School of Law, where she served as director of the SLU Law Legal Clinics and faculty supervisor of the Entrepreneurship and Community Development Clinic and the Business Law and Innovation Clinic. She also served for 10 years as in-house corporate counsel and staff director at McDonald’s Corporation.
In addition to Lee, BLC supervising faculty members include Mary Hanisch and Joe Stone. Hanisch, Lee’s co-director, has a background as an attorney and paralegal in private practice, holds an LLM in business law from Loyola, and teaches in that program and the Master of Jurisprudence in Business Law program.
Stone, who has a background in private practice, founded the clinic in 1999 in response to what he saw
as a lack of preparation for serving startups, coupled with a growing need for pro bono legal services for entrepreneurial clients. Since his retirement, Stone has stayed on as a part-time consultant to provide additional supervision to students.
Lee says she and the other supervising faculty enjoy watching students find their footing with clients as the semester goes on. “They grow,” she says, “and it’s delightful to watch them progress. The BLC offers a rich experiential education that’s unique to each student: one will become a specialist in a particular kind of contract; another will learn about a specific area of industry. The experience is driven partly by students’ own goals.”
