Jay A. Mitchell (BA ’80) is the founding director of the law school’s Organizations and Transactions Clinic. The clinic focuses on corporate and transactional practice. Its clients, all of whom are established nonprofit corporations, include national leaders in hunger relief, the performing and visual arts, science education, agriculture, and other fields. The clinic also maintains a resource website, targeted to lawyers engaging in pro bono work, that contains approximately 275 forms and model legal documents for nonprofits.

Professor Mitchell teaches and writes about bringing design sensibilities and methods to transactional practice. His book Picturing Corporate Practice, an introduction to corporate work written in collaboration with a graphic designer, encourages lawyers to make sketches and other visuals, and offers multiple examples of their use in everyday legal work. He has written about the use of product and graphic design principles in creating legal documents, and about the use of visuals in commercial contracts. Professor Mitchell has also published articles about preparing students for transactional practice including helping them learn how to read as a lawyer.

Before joining the law school in 2007, Professor Mitchell served for nearly 15 years as chief corporate counsel and a member of the legal and finance senior management teams at Levi Strauss & Co., where he was responsible for stockholder, finance, governance, disclosure, and commercial transaction matters. Earlier in his career, Mitchell was a partner at Heller Ehrman in San Francisco, an associate at Arnold & Porter in Washington, D.C., and law clerk to Judge John Lewis Smith of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.