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CEP Year In Review


Harvard Community Enterprise Project

2015 Year in Review


All,

It’s hard to believe that 2015 has come and gone, but here we are, well on our way into the new year. Here at the Community Enterprise Project (CEP) of the Harvard Transactional Law Clinics (TLC), we have already completed our first couple of weeks of the Spring 2016 semester and can already feel the excitement around our latest cases and projects. Before we get too far into 2016, however, we thought now would be a good time to recap our accomplishments in 2015, announce – at last! – the official release of our worker cooperative legal guide, and while we’re at it, provide links to some of the useful resources we’ve created over the last year..

Without further ado, here is our 2015 year in review:

2015 Project Highlights

Publication for Immigrant Entrepreneurs:TLC Immigrant Entrepreneurs

During the Spring 2015 semester, a team of students collaborated far and wide to develop A Legal Overview of Business Ownership for Immigrant Entrepreneurs in Massachusetts. What started as a local effort quickly became a national endeavor and a year later, we are still working with partners across the country to increase access to this valuable knowledge and support efforts to create similar resources in other states for immigrants and those who work with immigrants. If you or someone you know might be interested in creating a similar resource for your state, please contact us!

*This document has recently been translated into Spanish and will be made available on our website within the next couple of weeks. If you are interested in the Spanish version, check back here (scroll to the bottom) periodically.


Workshops for Veteran Entrepreneurs:

Also during the spring, a team of students partnered with the amazing technology-access organization Tech Goes Home to deliver valuable and interactive legal education at the Microsoft Store at the Prudential Center in Boston to military veterans who are starting businesses. CEP’s partnership with the Harvard Veterans Legal Clinic, the Veterans Enterprise Initiative, continues to flourish and direct military veteran entrepreneurs towards quality legal assistance.

Trip to Sustainable Economies Law Center:

Over the summer, CEP’s director, Amanda Kool, and CEP student Matt Diaz ‘16 traveled to Oakland, California to meet with Janelle Orsi and other members of the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC) to cement a partnership between CEP and SELC regarding the organizations’ shared efforts on issues related to immigrants and worker cooperatives. While there, Amanda and Matt were able to take part in one of SELC’s acclaimed Legal Cafés, where volunteer attorneys gather at the SELC offices to provide direct legal advice, host workshops, and engage in general discussions with community members about legal issues.

*Just Announced – Publication for Worker Cooperatives:

During the fall, a team of students, in partnership with SELC as well as a host of local organizations, created Tackling the Law, Together: A Legal Guide to Worker Cooperatives Generally and in Massachusetts. Though this email constitutes the first official release of the document, the “launch party” for the publication was held in December at the Equal Exchange Café in Boston, where dozens of worker cooperative members, enthusiasts, and technical assistance providers gathered to listen to the students as they presented highlights of the resource. *A reader-accessible Word version of this resource is available on our website.CEP at SELC

Presentations for Creative Entrepreneurs:

Also during the fall, a team of students worked with the Fairmount Innovation Lab, a Dorchester incubator space for local residents in the creative economy, to deliver a series of workshops on legal topics relevant to creative entrepreneurs. The presentations left plenty of time for questions and were followed by one-on-one legal counseling sessions for attendees.

2015 CEP in the News

Amanda Kool, (red jacket) clinical instructor at Harvard Law School teaches a clinic to teach students how to provide legal services to people who want to start their own small businesses inside 6 Everett Street in the Wasserstein Hall in the Harvard Law School at Harvard University. She is seen with here HLS students, Matthew Diaz, (from far left) Carolyn Ruiz, and Steven Salcedo. Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

Amanda Kool, (red jacket) clinical instructor at Harvard Law School teaches a clinic to teach students how to provide legal services to people who want to start their own small businesses inside 6 Everett Street in the Wasserstein Hall in the Harvard Law School at Harvard University. She is seen with here HLS students, Matthew Diaz, (from far left) Carolyn Ruiz, and Steven Salcedo. Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

All of this is in addition to the 40+ clients we served last year in CEP alone, not to mention all of the great client work, outreach, and presentations completed by the staff and students of the rest of the Harvard Transactional Law Clinics! 

On Deck for Spring 2016

Presentations for Worker Coops

Our worker coop team will be carrying forward the great work from last semester and will be delivering a series of presentations related to worker cooperatives.. Stay tuned for details about dates and locations, and if your organization is willing to host one of these presentations sometime in March or April, please let us know!
Boston Ujima Project

We also have a team of students working with the Center for Economic Democracy on the Center’s Boston Ujima Project, which is bringing together local stakeholders to model new ways for community businesses and residents in a specific geographic area to engage in locally-controlled investment, production, consumption to promote economic democracy.
We hope you are as excited about the promise of 2016 as we are. Best wishes for a happy, healthy, and fulfilling new year!

 

Amanda CEP Sig

 

TLC Logo-Otlns-Fnl    Community Enterprise Project

Taking people ‘to where they want to be’

[Published in the Harvard Gazette, Jan. 22, 2016, and in Harvard Law Today, Jan. 27th 2016]

Law School students help struggling small-time entrepreneurs flourish

By LIZ MINEO/HARVARD STAFF WRITER

Amanda Kool, (red jacket) clinical instructor at Harvard Law School teaches a clinic to teach students how to provide legal services to people who want to start their own small businesses inside 6 Everett Street in the Wasserstein Hall in the Harvard Law School at Harvard University. She is seen with here HLS students, Matthew Diaz, (from far left) Carolyn Ruiz, and Steven Salcedo. Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

Amanda Kool, (red jacket) clinical instructor at Harvard Law School teaches a clinic to teach students how to provide legal services to people who want to start their own small businesses inside 6 Everett Street in the Wasserstein Hall in the Harvard Law School at Harvard University. She is seen with here HLS students, Matthew Diaz, (from far left) Carolyn Ruiz, and Steven Salcedo. Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

Hailing from Buffalo, a once-prosperous city in upstate New York, Steven Salcedo knew how a lack of continued economic development can hinder families and mire people in poverty and hopelessness.

But it was only after he took a course at Harvard Law School that Salcedo realized that lawyers could help foster better times for communities.

“Lawyers can’t make economic development happen by themselves,” said Salcedo. “But we can contribute to help solve poverty by enabling people to do what they want to do. We’re like a bridge; we take them from where they are to where they want to be.”

The class Salcedo took, “Community Enterprise Project of the Transactional Law Clinics,” allows HLS students to help small business owners, entrepreneurs, and community groups create businesses, obtain permits and licenses, and negotiate contracts and other transactional (non-litigation) services.

Other transactional law clinics offered at HLS deal with business and nonprofits, entertainment law, and real estate.

Amanda Kool, an HLS lecturer on law and clinical instructor, directs the Community Enterprise Project. Under her supervision, students work out of HLS’s Legal Services Center in Jamaica Plain, dividing their time between assisting clients and partnering with community organizations on projects that address broader legal barriers to economic development in the community.

The course benefits both students who are interested in pursuing social-justice work and community members who need their services, said Kool. Since 2013, students have produced legal toolkits compiling laws and regulations that govern worker cooperatives, condominium associations, and food trucks, and staged legal workshops for military veterans who are starting small businesses and for entrepreneurs in the creative economy. Last October, they published a first-of-its-kind legal guidebook for immigrant entrepreneurs.

“A lot of the social ills that result in crimes tied to poverty could be cured through economic development,” said Kool. “Our work has a strong public purpose.”

By helping people who want to start small enterprises but lack the moneys to hire an attorney, students promote business development and job growth, said Kool. For many students, the fact that lawyers can help people overcome barriers to economic development comes as a something of a surprise.

That was the case for Matt Diaz, who registered in the course with a desire to do transactional law but without knowing what to expect. He worked with clients who wanted to start a landscape worker cooperative and as a result, helped write a worker coop guide and the guidebook for immigrant entrepreneurs.

“I’m a nerd for tackling new and unresolved legal issues,” said Diaz. “The course was like a rabbit hole for legal research. I had tons of fun.”

For Carolyn Ruiz, the course offered an opportunity to plunge into a neighborhood far from campus and interact with community organizations.

“In law school, everything is hypothetical,” she said. “This gave me the chance to work with real people in the real world.”

The course also helped her practice her Spanish skills with Salvador Esteban, a client who comes from Mexico.

“We wouldn’t have been able to help him” otherwise, said Ruiz, a Texan of Mexican descent. “He only spoke Spanish.”

A father of two, Esteban, 45, runs a hot-dog cart near the Boston Common, and needed help with licensing and permitting.

“I didn’t know how to pay taxes or how to apply for permits with City Hall or the health department,” he said.

Students relish the opportunity to be immersed in a workaday community. Because their clients work during the week, students sometimes spend weekends and evenings meeting with them at their homes or businesses near Jamaica Plain.

Salcedo took the course three times because he found his calling. It changed more than his career path, he said.

“It did change the course of my life,” he said. “I entered law school because I wanted to help underrepresented people. I was unsure of how I wanted to do so, though. I learned that law can empower low-income entrepreneurs who are working to revitalize their neighborhoods and provide for their families.”

Salcedo was awarded a prestigious Skadden Foundation Fellowship to create a program like the Community Enterprise Project to help small entrepreneurs in his hometown. After graduation, he plans to go back to Buffalo to work at the Western New York Law Center, a nonprofit that provides legal services in civil matters to low-income residents.

“I can’t imagine a more fulfilling way to use my legal education,” he said.

Harvard Law’s Community Enterprise Project Heads to Oakland, Forges Partnership with Sustainable Economies Law Center

[Originally Posted on the Office of Clinical and Pro Bono Programs blog September 30. 2015.
Also covered by Harvard Law Today October 9th 2015]

By Matt Diaz, J.D. ’16 

In early August, Amanda L. Kool, Lecturer on Law and Clinical Instructor of Harvard Law School’s Community Enterprise Project of the Transactional Law Clinics (“CEP”), and CEP clinical student Matt Diaz, J.D. ’16, met with staff members of the Sustainable Economies Law Center (“SELC”) in Oakland, California to cement a partnership between the two organizations. With a shared ambition to foster community economic development through innovative approaches to transactional law, the partnership between the relatively-new law school clinic and the influential legal services organization carries tremendous potential for the organizations themselves, the clients they represent, and lawyers interested in how transactional law can play an important role in the modern economy.

Co-founded by Janelle Orsi and Jenny Kassan, SELC engages a broad set of legal approaches to facilitate “community resilience and grassroots economic empowerment.” Through its various interconnected programs—including its program focused on promoting cooperative businesses—the organization offers legal expertise to empower communities to transition to fairer and more robust local economies. SELC’s multifaceted strategy involves legislative advocacy, workshops, and educational materials for lawyers and community members, and the delivery of legal services through channels such as its “Resilient Communities Legal Cafe,” where SELC staff and volunteer attorneys provide legal consultations to community businesses and organizations.

CEP is similarly invested in community economic development, though CEP’s targeted communities are those that surround the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School in the Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain. In addition to representing clients with a wide range of transactional legal needs, CEP students work in small groups to connect with community organizations, identify transactional legal needs common to their community, and develop tailor-made, comprehensive strategies to address those needs.

Cooperative Connection

During the fall semester, a group of CEP students will work closely with SELC staff to create a comprehensive guide that demystifies the myriad laws related to forming and operating a cooperative business in Massachusetts. The collaboration between CEP and SELC will afford the students access to some of the nation’s foremost experts on cooperatives, while CEP’s local community ties and outreach efforts ensure that the guide will benefit from a strong network of cooperative lawyers and technical assistance providers in Greater Boston, as well. Once finished, the guide will be published, translated, and distributed through the Transactional Law Clinics’ website and through the project’s community partners, as well as hosted by SELC on the state-by-state resources page of their popular website, www.co-oplaw.org.

Immigrant Entrepreneurship

CEPIn addition to the cooperative guide, CEP tapped SELC’s expertise to finalize a document produced last semester by CEP students Susan Nalunkuma, LL.M. ’15, Steven Salcedo, J.D. ’16, and Diaz. This document, A Legal Overview of Business Ownership for Immigrant Entrepreneurs in Massachusetts, was created in partnership with the Immigrant Worker Center Collaborative and is intended for use by immigrant entrepreneurs in Massachusetts, as well as by technical assistance providers and community organizers who work with immigrant entrepreneurs across the state.

Because of the document’s comprehensive foray into diverse areas of law, preparation of the materials entailed cutting-edge research at the intersection of business law, employment law, tax law, and immigration law, bringing together dozens of lawyers, academics, and professionals in the community and across the country. Due to the profile of the project, CEP students and staff were able to connect with people such as Sergio Garcia, an undocumented immigrant who became a lawyer in 2014 after a five-year legal battle that ended with a new state law permitting undocumented immigrants to be admitted to the California bar.

“CEP has a successful track record of creating well-researched, useful publications amid the community workshops, client representation, and other great work CEP students complete each semester. However, this project proved to be our most challenging one yet, due to the many areas of law involved and the fact that no one, to our knowledge, has ever compiled such a thorough analysis of the many legal implications of immigrant entrepreneurship. We could not have completed this project without our lead project partner (the Immigrant Worker Center Collaborative) and their meaningful connections to the population at the heart of this document, and we are indebted to countless lawyers and other experts across the country who advised and supported us along the way.” ­–Amanda L. Kool, Lecturer on Law  

Though the document was only recently published, A Legal Overview of Business Ownership for Immigrant Entrepreneurs in Massachusetts promises to have national significance, as other organizations already plan to build upon CEP’s work by creating new iterations of the document for other states across the U.S. This fall, Professor Eliza Platts-Mills and her students in the Entrepreneurship and Community Development Clinic of the University of Texas Law School will be modeling CEP’s project on behalf of immigrant entrepreneurs in Texas, and similar collaborations have been proposed by lawyers in other states. CEP and SELC are currently exploring ways in which SELC can host these state-specific resources for immigrant entrepreneurs on their popular website.

“Working on the immigrant entrepreneurs document has served as an invaluable source of development for me,” Diaz said. “The project presented an opportunity to make a significant impact in uncharted legal territory, uncovering a rabbit hole of legal research possibilities. The effect we have been able to spark on a sizable underrepresented population is a testament to CEP, which allows students to tap into their entrepreneurial spirits and target relevant issues afflicting local community members. I cannot wait to see that effect expand, as organizations around the country build upon the foundation we have built.” –Matt

TLC – CEP Concludes Milestone Semester

[Posted on December 16, 2013 in the HLS Clinical and Pro Bono Programs Blog]

By: Amanda Kool, Clinical Fellow,Transactional Law Clinic

Amanda Kool, Veronica Sauer, Josh Wackerly, Brett Heeger

Left-to-Right: Amanda Kool, Veronica Sauer, Josh Wackerly, and Brett Heeger

Wednesday, December 4th was a day for the record books of the revamped Community Enterprise Project of the Transactional Law Clinics (CEP). After months comprised of countless meetings with clients and community partners, treks from campus to Jamaica Plain, toolkit revisions, and lunch jaunts to City Feed (restaurant Jamaica Plain), the three CEP students capped the semester with a whirlwind, 12-hour day in which their efforts culminated with an ease which belied the amount of effort it took to get there.

After an end-of-year breakfast in Jamaica Plain and a few finishing touches on individual cases at the Legal Services Center, the team picked up 100 copies of the freshly printed Boston Food Truck Legal Toolkit before heading to Boston’s City Hall. There, CEP was joined by members of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic (FLPC), who represent the other half of the cross-clinical team working on the food truck project, and together the clinics presented the materials contained in the toolkit to a lively audience of inspiring food truck owners on behalf of the Mayor’s Office of Food Initiatives (OFI). FLPC student Jason Qu ‘14 expertly clarified Boston’s food truck permitting and licensing regimes, while CEP students Veronica Sauer ’14 and Josh Wackerly ‘14 guided the attendees through the finer points of business formation, employment law, and other legal implications of starting a business. “Our challenge [with the toolkit and presentation] was to make a complex body of laws and regulations accessible for the community,” stated Qu. “We ended up creating a valuable resource for potential vendors and for the City itself.” As team members leafed through the 77 page document, which had been carefully organized to guide a potential food truck vendor through the myriad of legal processes of starting a food truck from business plan to sample contracts, Wackerly added, “when you see [the Toolkit] in print, you can definitely appreciate the amount of work the whole team put into it. It was very rewarding to be able to finish such a major project and then have the opportunity to turn around and present that product to the public and immediately witness the positive impact we’ve had on the community.”

At the end of the presentation, each attendee walked away with not only a deeper understanding of the process and a copy of the toolkit, but also an invitation to contact the FLPC/CEP team for individual legal representation, whether for assistance navigating one piece of the process or for help with all of it. Officials from the City of Boston were similarly pleased with the toolkit and presentation. Peter Murphy, Program Coordinator of OFI, commented afterward, “The presentation was thoughtful, incredibly clear, and provided a real benefit to the potential [food truck] vendors. The resources [the clinics] have created for us are really vital to the help that we are able to provide vendors – I cannot thank [CEP and FLPC] enough.” For the FLPC and CEP students involved, the end of Wednesday’s presentation meant a challenging and fulfilling semester of clinical work was now officially behind them. Sauer remarked, “I’m incredibly proud of the toolkit we compiled, as well as the way we all worked together as a team to produce a document that we are all proud of and all feel ownership for. I think creating a lasting resource for the community was a tremendous thing to accomplish.”

For FLPC Director Emily Broad Leib and Transactional Law Clinics attorney and Clinical Fellow Amanda Kool, Wednesday also marked the culmination of over a year’s worth of preparation, but only the beginning of ongoing cross-practice collaboration. Under Broad Leib’s supervision, former students of the FLPC, including Duncan Farthing-Nichol ’14, had begun work with OFI over a year prior to conduct an in-depth review of the city’s current rules for food trucks and recommend changes to streamline the process, improve efficiency, and facilitate expansion of the program. After FLPC delivered policy recommendations on those rules to OFI, FLPC engaged CEP to tackle the general legal challenges faced by aspiring food truck vendors. CEP students, including former student Ryan Hatten ’14, supplemented the permitting and licensing information with the types of general transactional law information for which clients contact the Harvard Transactional Law Clinics each day, but tailored to the specific needs of food truck vendors. Connections were made with existing food trucks, commissary kitchens, payroll service companies, and business assistance providers over the span of a year to fill knowledge gaps in the toolkit. A full description of the project can be found in an article co-authored by Broad Leib and Kool, “Using Cross-practice Collaboration to Meet the Evolving Legal Needs of Local Food Entrepreneurs,” which was published in the Fall 2013 issue of the quarterly American Bar Association magazine Natural Resources and Environment.  Kool explains, “When Emily and I co-wrote the ABA article in the spring, we utilized the publication to outline the steps our respective clinics would each take to get to the project where we wanted it to go. By the time the publication hit mailboxes across the country this week, we had achieved each of those steps, precisely as we had envisioned.”

Yet the production of the Food Truck Toolkit marks only a milestone (if a major one) in the clinics’ efforts to support Boston’s food truck community. Broad Leib, looking forward to next semester, continues, “The next phase of the plan is for CEP to begin representing individual food trucks and transfer the wisdom gained back to FLPC, effectively closing the feedback loop to guide FLPC’s next round of policy recommendations to the City. Though the hardest part is now behind us, this cross-practice collaborative model allows us to continue to work together in a synergistic way, utilizing the particular strengths of each clinic to generate a return on the collaboration that is greater than the sum of its individual successes.”

While the FLPC/CEP food truck project will conduct additional trainings and begin to represent individual food truck vendors moving forward, new client casework and a number of new community projects will be brought into CEP’s mix, as well. Next semester, CEP will double in size, with six students working out of the Legal Services Center. Like this semester, CEP students will split their time between individual, direct client representation and large, collaborative projects. CEP students Wackerly and Brett Heeger ‘14 have decided to continue with CEP into the spring semester. “For me,” states Heeger, “what makes CEP so exciting is the chance we have to think about community needs from multiple angles.” He adds, “Many HLS students are interested in doing pro bono work after graduation, including fellowships like Equal Justice Works and Skadden or pro bono practices within law firms. Project development skills learned through CEP offer direct experience that can be applied to designing or helping to expand pro bono practices – experience that is rarely available, especially in the transactional law realm.”

Despite its rapid growth, CEP will continue to focus its work in the community of Jamaica Plain and surrounding neighborhoods. “It’s been immensely rewarding to immerse myself in the communities in which I’m working,” Heeger continues. “I’ve been invited to concerts where my clients are performing, eaten food that my clients have produced, and bumped into community leaders on the street outside the Legal Services Center. People have been incredibly welcoming and enormously grateful as CEP has attempted to find opportunities to expand and support otherwise underserved needs.”

Community Enterprise Project Expanding in Spring 2014

TLC’s Community Enterprise Project Concludes Milestone Semester

Amanda Kool, Veronica Sauer, Josh Wackerly, Brett Heeger

Left-to-Right: Amanda Kool, Veronica Sauer, Josh Wackerly, and Brett Heeger

Next semester, the Transactional Law Clinic’s Community Enterprise Project (CEP) will double in size, with six students working out of the Legal Services Center. Like this semester, CEP students will split their time between individual, direct client representation and large, collaborative projects. CEP students Josh Wackerly and Brett Heeger ‘14 have decided to continue with CEP into the spring semester. “For me,” states Heeger, “what makes CEP so exciting is the chance we have to think about community needs from multiple angles.” He adds, “Many HLS students are interested in doing pro bono work after graduation, including fellowships like Equal Justice Works and Skadden or pro bono practices within law firms. Project development skills learned through CEP offer direct experience that can be applied to designing or helping to expand pro bono practices – experience that is rarely available, especially in the transactional law realm.”

Despite its rapid growth, CEP will continue to focus its work in the community of Jamaica Plain and surrounding neighborhoods. “It’s been immensely rewarding to immerse myself in the communities in which I’m working,” Heeger continues. “I’ve been invited to concerts where my clients are performing, eaten food that my clients have produced, and bumped into community leaders on the street outside the Legal Services Center. People have been incredibly welcoming and enormously grateful as CEP has attempted to find opportunities to expand and support otherwise underserved needs.”

Read more here.

TLC and CEP Bring Young Hip-Hop Artists to Harvard

studio-heat-pic-300hUpon first meeting his new client Javon, aka “Yung Fresh,” clinical student Brett Heeger (HLS ’14) asked if Javon’s recent performance to over one hundred corporate leaders from Converse was his biggest performance. “No,” Javon casually replied, “at the Boston Urban Music Festival, I performed to about 50,000 people.” At the time of the Festival, Javon was fourteen years old.

Javon is the senior member of Studio Heat, a group of young Boston musicians that have grown out of the Music Clubhouse at the Blue Hill Chapter of the Boys and Girls Club in Boston. Ranging in age from pre-teen to 18, some of these students have already achieved measures of success that many adults will never obtain. A recent visit to the group’s facilities in Dorchester found students engaged in music lessons, songwriting sessions and laying down tracks, led primarily by senior students in Studio Heat and volunteers.

On November 11, 2013, Heeger and the Harvard Transactional Law Clinics (TLC) had the chance to welcome seven middle and high school students from Studio Heat to HLS as part of an introduction to the broader world of the music business. After a brief tour of campus, the group engaged in a mock negotiation intended to teach the students about the role of lawyers in the music industry. The students served as junior attorneys in a negotiation between Royal T (derived from a negotiation exercise created by alum Rafael Mares ’99 while a student in the HLS Recording Artists Project), a fictional recording artist portrayed by Clinical Fellow Amanda Kool, and a fictional record label, Ames Production Company, represented by TLC student Josh Wackerly (HLS ’14). Heeger filled the role of senior attorney on behalf of Royal T, while Professor Brian Price, Director of TLC, served as senior attorney for the production company. Over nearly two hours of client meetings and negotiations, the Studio Heat ‘attorneys’ were able to draft a record deal addressing a number of essential contract terms, including the term  length, advance payments, and ownership of creative rights.

In a debrief over refreshments, students reflected on the exercise and discussed the important and surprisingly large role of lawyers in the music industry. Kirkland Lynch (HLS ’14) and Lauren Gore (HLS ’14) also joined the conversation to share their experiences working in the music industry and attending law school. Each emphasized how important building a supportive community can be to making choices that might lead to a path of success, whether as an artist or to Harvard Law School. The young students shared their own aspirations, in the music industry and otherwise. One student commented that he now realized that signing a record deal didn’t equal instant fame or success while another admitted that she was considering becoming a lawyer if her plans to make it as a hip hop artist didn’t pan out. Rick Aggeler, Senior Music Director of Studio Heat, said, “[The kids] were so thrilled about the whole experience.  From the tour itself, to working with “Royal T”, and having Brett and Brian act as advisors during the negotiation, it was honestly for me as well one of the coolest field trips I’ve ever gotten to take our kids on.”

The Studio Heat visit to Harvard Law School grew out of TLC’s new Community Enterprise Project (CEP), a sub-clinic of TLC that Kool is in the process of growing into its own, stand-alone clinic. CJ Azubuine, Senior Manager of Harvard’s Office of Event Scheduling and Support and volunteer at the Music Clubhouse, originally contacted Professor Price with some basic legal questions related to Studio Heat.  “We’re continuing to help Studio Heat out with some really interesting legal issues, including questions of copyright and licensing when all of the students are minors,” Heeger explained, “and the great part of CEP is that we’re encouraged to think creatively about how to bring our legal expertise to bear to serve our clients.”

Where TLC operates much like a law firm by responding to client requests for direct legal services, CEP aims to engage traditionally underserved neighborhoods in a more proactive way, partnering with community organizations to identify organizational and community needs and develop comprehensive strategies, whether legal or otherwise, to address those needs. Price explains, “When the Clinic moved from the Legal Services Center to campus, we lost some of our connections to Boston’s neighborhoods. I am thrilled that CEP has reemerged and glad to see TLC clinic students back in Jamaica Plain, serving people in and around that community.”

Law students have also responded positively to this opportunity; Heeger and Wackerly are two of the three students in the Community Enterprise Project this semester, and Kool expects the program to contain six students next semester. Heeger reflected on how CEP’s approach to lawyering influenced his representation of Studio Heat. “Here, in conversations with Rick, CJ, and Javon, we realized that the kids themselves could really benefit from an engaging experience with music law, rather than exclusively receiving traditional legal advice from their lawyers. With the team emphasis of CEP, and encouragement from Brian and Amanda, we were able to put together a broader program that was educational and I think extremely fun for both sides.”