SLS Students: Join us for the 2025-26 academic year. Clinic enrollment is now open. Click here for full details on how to apply to the Juelsgaard Clinic and the other clinics in the Mills Legal Clinic.

In the Juelsgaard Intellectual Property and Innovation Clinic, students engage in hands-on representation of clients in cutting-edge matters involving IP (copyright and the DMCA, patent, and trademark) and other laws and technology policy advocacy that affect innovation, including AI regulation and accountability, online speech and content moderation, tech and racial justice, antitrust and competition, pharmaceutical regulation, privacy, cybersecurity, net neutrality, and much more.

Clinic students draft amicus briefs for the Supreme Court or federal appellate and district courts, or pursue litigation in federal district court. Students submit detailed comments and live testimony in rulemaking proceedings before the FCC, Copyright Office, PTO, FDA, FTC, and other agencies. Students also work closely with clients to provide counseling and legal advice to help those clients solve complex tech, IP or other innovation-related legal, technical, and business problems. And students draft public-facing policy whitepapers or “best practices” documents to influence tech policy in ways that benefit innovators and innovation. In all our work, we engage with and seek to understand the role that race, racism, and structural inequality play in the development, deployment, use, and regulation of technology.

Our clients are non-profits and advocacy organizations; groups of innovators, entrepreneurs, technology users/consumers, legal academics, computer scientists, or technologists; or sometimes individual entrepreneurs, startups, biohackers, media critics, or open-source advocates, among others. Our work ranges across tech areas such as internet/information technology, biotech, pharmaceuticals, and online speech and media. In all these activities, students are immersed in the vital role lawyers play in identifying and evaluating options for their clients and developing and presenting sophisticated written and oral arguments on their behalf to achieve their goals. The clinic experience helps students develop a rich set of skills, judgment, commitment to racial and social justice, professional identity, and doctrinal knowledge that they carry beyond SLS into their lives as lawyers and advocates.

The Juelsgaard Clinic had two of our busiest years yet in 2023-24 and 2024-25. Clinic students submitted ten amicus briefs in nine cases: in the Federal Circuit, Tenth Circuit, and Eleventh Circuit; in district courts in the Northern District of Texas and the Eastern District of Pennsylvania; and in the California Supreme Court and the New York State intermediate court of appeals. These cases involved patent prosecution laches, design patents and abusive litigation, trademark infringement in keyword advertising, copyright fair use for documentaries, scrutinizing expert testimony in patent damages proceedings, the FTC’s new rule banning non-compete clauses in employment agreements (a rule the Clinic supported in 2024 in separate comments to the FTC), online privacy and the Stored Communications Act, and the right to free expression and anonymity online. JIPIC also filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Los Angeles to protect public-domain access to Shakespeare’s plays from bogus copyright takedown notices and lawwuit threats. to defend several small businesses in litigation in federal district court against abusive copyright and patent claims.

Students also submitted five major sets of comments, three to the US Patent and Trademark Office (addressing AI Inventorship, increasing diversity and inclusive innovation in the patent system, and urging the PTO to promote innovation and access to information to benefit the public), one to the US Copyright Office on behalf of small creators who use the Copyright Claims Board process, and one to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (supporting patent march-in rights to reduce the prices of prescription medicine), as well as preparing a draft of comments to the California Privacy Protection Agency (highlighting several privacy related concerns with new proposed state regulations regarding risk assessments and automated decision-making technology).

Clinic students also counseled a variety of individuals and small organizations on a variety of legal and technical issues, including advising AI safety researchers on safe harbors for legal risks; an innovative artists’ collective; an open-science startup; an organization that assists small artists, writers, and musicians regarding various copyright and fair use issues; and a small music licensing service about its freedom to distribute public domain music. Other JIPIC clients included several public advocacy organizations and groups of law, economics, and business professors and scholars.

Past projects include over 25 amicus briefs to the Supreme Court (and several times traveling to Washington, DC, to attend oral arguments), plus numerous other amicus briefs to various US courts; and amicus submissions to the European Court of Human Rights, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Students filed other major comments, including to the FTC and CFPB on bias in the use of AI tenant screening tools, to the US NTIA on AI Accountability, to the Copyright Office on DMCA Section 512 and 1201 and software copyright, and to the FDA on genetic testing and personalized medicine. Students traveled to Copyright Office roundtables in Washington, DC, Los Angeles, and San Francisco to present several rounds of live testimony. And they prepared and published public whitepapers aimed at tech startups explaining alternative, innovation-friendly patent licensing practices, and counseled numerous individual clients about fair use, first-sale and contractual issues, open source hardware and content licensing, innovative patent strategy, copyright and trademark registrations, and more.

For some of the most recent work by Juelsgaard Clinic students, see our student blog posts about their cases below.