Organizations and Transactions Clinic
The Organizations and Transactions Clinic provides free corporate legal services to Northern California nonprofits.
What Our Clients Say
We've worked with the Clinic for many years on governance and contract matters. They always listen carefully, gain quickly an understanding of relevant programs and issues, and then give us advice and documents that not only address the legal and operational concerns but also reflect our culture and brand. Working with the Clinic really helps me address risks and relationships for the Food Bank in a thorough and practical way.
O&T students partnered with us during three important engagements. We found their analysis clear; their business case grounded; and their work product practical. More importantly, the long-term impact felt on our work due to our new governance structure has been positive and transformative.
Working with the Stanford Law Clinic felt seamless and effortless. They asked great questions, were very specific with their requests, and were impressively efficient with our time. In return, we were handed a set of highly useful policies, contracts, charters, and so much more that were essentially instantly ready to be adopted by our board. The professors and students were professional, perceptive, and responsive - and had a sense of humor, too.
As a design firm working in the nonprofit sector (IDEO.org), we love the human-centered legal focus that the O&T clinic brings to the projects we've done with them. From the font choice to the plain English nature of the O&T deliverables, the legal design sensibilities from the O&T clinic is fantastic. I doubt there is another clinic in the country doing anything like this.
As a nonprofit with no historic internal legal support, we had a lot to tackle when we first started working together. The students helped us sort through our contracting landscape (both inbound and outbound) and prioritize areas of need. The support the Clinic has provided has really helped us streamline our processes, manage our risk, and ensure we can focus as much attention and resources as possible on our mission of giving all students access to a quality education.
We engaged the clinic to execute the merger of six affiliated corporations in the fall of '08. This was a very complicated transaction...and it was beautifully executed. Since then, we have consistently engaged O&T on critical contract and risk mitigation projects. In every instance, the clinic has been incredibly responsive, efficient, and completely professional. I am extremely proud of our relationship with O&T; the clinic has added tremendous value to the KIPP Foundation and network of schools.
We’ve found the Clinic’s teams to be highly professional, competent, and client-focused. The work product has been thoughtfully created to respond to our request for user-friendly, plain English legal documents that can be adapted for our complex multi-jurisdictional operations. We also particularly appreciate the Clinic’s ability to develop instructions, checklists and procedures for use of the documents, as this helps us train staff across disciplines, thereby reducing risk globally.
The O&T Clinic has been an invaluable resource for our organization. They have advised us on a number of projects including simplifying our bylaws, establishing governance policies and tools, revising our farmers' market rules, and helping us develop our farm audit program. The professors and students were professional, engaged and responsive. The Clinic provided us with an incredible amount of high-quality free legal work, allowing us to focus our organization’s critical time and resources on our mission.
The Clinic helped us update our governance documents, some of which dated back to the 1970s. They listened carefully to us describe what wasn’t working and where we thought changes could be made. It was clear the law students were extremely well-prepared by the questions they asked our team, and really understood the nuances associated with the work to be done. The work product produced by the Clinic was outstanding – it was presented in a way all of us could understand without too much legalese. They thought of everything we needed to adopt the new documents.
Fashion Incubator San Francisco is dedicated to accelerating emerging fashion design businesses and creating industry growth and job creation in the Bay Area. When we started working with the clinic, we were in transition from an incubator to a full business accelerator model. The Stanford team worked in an incredibly professional and thorough manner to create documents for the new business model. They navigated the intricacies of our nonprofit world, offering many innovative suggestions integral to our approach in running our organization.
The Stanford Law Clinic has worked with us on several projects and we continue to be impressed with the level of professionalism and work product we receive each time. We found that the students quickly grasp the issues we present and thoroughly provide what we request. The final presentations of work product are thorough, thoughtful and careful to ensure a quick grasp on our part. This year, we were so confident of the work the Stanford Law Clinic did on Enterprise Risk Management, that we showed the final report to our Board Audit Committee. The reactions of our Audit Committee members were ecstatic, with one member even commenting that he “wished the smaller public companies he audits had such a well-organized, clear report.”
O&T Featured on MLC Blog
O&T Clinic Students Complete Spring Quarter Projects
Congratulations to all students in the Organizations and Transactions Clinic on a successful spring quarter. Under the supervision of director Jay Mitchell and clinical supervising attorney Michelle Sonu, students worked on a variety of corporate, contract, advisory, and governance matters, described below: Contract and advice matters: Nicole Chen (’18) and Janessa…
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