A decade ago in New York City, a formerly incarcerated man took the fitness techniques he developed in prison and parlayed them into a business with a delightfully decriptive name: ConBody. Since then, ConBody has not only helped thousands of New Yorkers get into shape, it has also hired many formerly incarcerated people as trainers and other team members, reducing recidivism and providing jobs to a population that often has trouble finding employment. It is an inspiring entrepreneurial success story. And at least some small part of ConBody’s success can be attributed to the free legal and business counseling the founder received from Bernice Grant and her entrepreneurship clinic students at the University of Pennsylvania Carey School of Law and later at Fordham Law School.

“ConBody is a great example of the kinds of founders and companies we can assist in an entrepreneurship clinic,” says Grant, who joined Stanford Law School in August to run the Stanford Law School clinic previously known as the Organizations and Transactions Clinic, now reframed as the Entrepreneurship Clinic. Starting in the spring quarter, the clinic will offer students the opportunity to counsel low-income entrepreneurs, as well as socially conscious startups. “In many cases, these are ventures that would not be able to get off the ground without the assistance of the clinic,” she says.

Except for a short stint as a summer associate in Los Angeles during law school, Grant spent her entire pre-Stanford life on the East Coast and is now reveling at being in the world’s epicenter for entrepreneurship. “There’s no better place to have a clinic for law and entrepreneurship because there are so many resources right outside my window that we can leverage to help the clinic be successful,” she says. “When people think about Silicon Valley, they envision tech entrepreneurs who have a lot of resources, but there are so many other underserved, low-income entrepreneurs who can’t afford to access those kinds of resources.”

“It’s ultimately about encouraging people to be entrepreneurial within an organization rather than trying to quash their entrepreneurial spirit.”

Professor Bernice Grant

Early Exposure to Business and Accounting

Grant grew up in Rockville, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., the daughter of immigrants from Guyana. Her father was an accountant and her mother a nurse. When she was just 6 years old, she helped her father study for his CPA exam. “I was charged with quizzing him with flash cards, so the world of business and accounting was something I was exposed to very early.”

“But I was interested in law pretty early too,” she says. “In high school I took part in a mock trial program, which planted a seed.” After studying business and accounting at Wake Forest University, Grant briefly followed in her father’s CPA footsteps before starting law school at Harvard. After seven years as a corporate associate at Davis Polk & Wardwell, Grant made her move into academia, teaching in the Lawyering Program at New York University School of Law and then moving to the University of Pennsylvania as a clinical supervisor and lecturer in the Entrepreneurship Legal Clinic.

At Penn, Professor Praveen Kosuri helped train Grant to become a clinical professor. “Her in-class teaching style is reflective of her personality—calm, prepared, and unflappable,” Kosuri says. “Bernice holds to the traditional clinical pedagogy of being non-directive, granting students space to figure things out themselves and claim ownership over their client matters. At the same time, her feedback to students is clear and constructive. She is completely accessible to students whenever they need her guidance.”

At Fordham, Grant served as the senior director of the Entrepreneurial Law Program and founded the Entrepreneurial Law Clinic. There she also conceived and led the school’s “Startup LAWnchpad” podcast to educate entrepreneurs about legal issues affecting startup ventures. In 2022, she received the Association of American Law School’s M. Shanara Gilbert Award in recognition of her clinical education work advising underserved communities.

“As a business lawyer, it is certainly helpful to have an appreciation of business and accounting and that impacts the way that I teach,” she says. “I always tell my students that the best business lawyers are those who are conversant not just in the law, but also business.”

In her scholarship, Grant is exploring how to integrate emerging technologies like artificial intelligence into clinical education. She is also interested in noncompete agreements and, in a recent Brooklyn Law Review article, suggested a new, arguably counterintuitive approach to noncompetes, which the Federal Trade Commission has been trying to ban through a proposed rule that remains stymied in the federal courts.

Grant’s article, “Unleashing Corporate Entrepreneurship,” supports a ban on noncompetes while also promoting a different approach: Build a culture that lowers employees’ incentives to exit and increases their incentives to stay, thereby reducing the need for noncompetes in the first place. Companies should encourage intrapreneurship—i.e., entrepreneurship within a company,” she says.

“It’s ultimately about encouraging people to be entrepreneurial within an organization rather than trying to quash their entrepreneurial spirit,” she says. “There’s something exciting that happens when someone has an idea for a business, and that’s what motivates me every day in my clinic work.” SL