NSU Horizons Fall 2017

24 NSU HORIZONS Garon said the Sharon and Mitchell W. Berger Entrepreneur Law Clinic, which will be in place “no later than our January term,” will contribute greatly to the university, but also to NSU’s financial impact on South Florida. “The entrepreneur law clinic will enable our students to be part of the economic development of the region,” said Garon. “The start-ups served will be developing new medical treatments, new technologies, and new creative endeavors. By providing free and low-cost services to these entrepreneurs, we enable a much broader and more inclusive group of potential entre- preneurs to achieve success.” The donation from the Bergers—“seed capital,” accord- ing to Berger—will fund the clinic annually to support an attorney specialist who will administer the clinic and coordinate community outreach. Law students will also learn “the rules of the road,” said Mitchell Berger. “This is a way to help young lawyers work with young entrepreneurs in order for them to bring their businesses into formation. Sharon and I wanted to put down the seeds, and if this all grows together, well, we will see. That’s entrepreneurial,” he said. Getting these ideas to market takes legal specialization, which many university law schools aren’t versed in train- ing, according to Berger. NSU now joins the ranks of high-profile universities with this type of specialized offering. For example, the University of Pennsylvania Law School offers an Entrepreneurship Legal Clinic that provides pro bono transactional legal services to Philadelphia-area entrepreneurs and businesses. The Entrepreneurial Law Clinic at the University of Colorado— Boulder provides law students with practical experience, while offering valuable legal services without charge to local start-up businesses lacking access to legal resources. Garon sees NSU’s Berger Entrepreneur Law Clinic as an illustration of the “cutting edge of legal education,” where experiential training combines with interdisciplinary solu- tions to suit client needs and provides economic opportuni- ties for clients, their communities, and the South Florida region. South Florida also lacks an existing transactional pro bono and low-bono legal representation program that specifically targets the needs of nonprofit organizations, and low-to-medium income inventors and innovators, according to Garon. “The new clinic adds a unique aspect to transactional lawyering by focusing on the essential legal services needed for new businesses bringing scientific and creative works to market. These entrepreneurs face many challenges, and the training for law students is essential to help those entrepre- neurs succeed,” he added. Ideally, access to the law clinic will become an interdisci- plinary base for researchers and scientists at the CCR and NSU’s Halmos College of Natural Sciences and Ocean- ography to create partnerships with students at Shepard Broad College of Law and H. Wayne Huizenga College of Business and Entrepreneurship. “We are actually tying the intellectual capital to both the business abilities and the legal abilities we have here, to bring this intellectual capital to market by using the skills of the business students and the law students,” said Berger. Added Sharon Berger, “We need to teach people how this all works.” The Bergers also see another impact that the Sharon and Mitchell W. Berger Entrepreneur Law Clinic will have on the region. “We’ll be training lawyers who will be right here in our own backyard and who will have a well-rounded under- standing of the 21st-century landscape,” Berger said. n The “seed capital” from Sharon Berger and her husband, Mitchell, will support an attorney specialist who will administer the clinic and coordinate its community outreach. continued from previous page