Center for Law, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Advances Multidisciplinary Collaboration
New center offers expanded law and entrepreneurship education for students and business owners
By: Suzanne King Raney
Professor Anthony Luppino, Dean Emerita Barb Glesner Fines, Professor Evan Absher, Professor Danielle Merrick and Ayyoub Ajmi, Director of Legal Innovation and Technology
If he could choose credentials to list after his name, Professor Anthony (Tony) Luppino might add S.B. to the J.D. and LL.M. already there.
“S.B. for silo buster,” he explains.
Luppino, a Rubey M. Hulen Professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law and senior fellow with the Regnier Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Bloch School of Management, is director of the law school’s new Center for Law, Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
The center, which the university officially established in 2023 using funds from a Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation grant, is opening offices on the top floor of the Leon E. Bloch Law Library. It will bring under one roof a variety of long-established programs and project-based courses to give them more visibility, help them be sustainable for years to come and — perhaps most importantly — take them out of their siloed existences.
“The center will expand the impact of the interdisciplinary, multi-institutional collaborations that have characterized them,” Luppino says. “Cross-disciplinary teams, working toward a common mission, can do much more to address complex challenges than individuals operating in silos.”
The CLEI will build on the law school’s more than 20-year commitment to “Entrepreneurial Lawyering.” This commitment includes teaching law students to see the world through their clients’ eyes, as they learn to work in teams with individuals trained in other professions and acquire expertise to offer solutions to complex challenges.
The center will also continue offering legal services in the community; facilitate technology commercialization at UMKC and across the KC region; focus on using technology to make education about laws and access to justice more widely available; and foster building communities of practice in such endeavors.
“Importantly, much of the multifaceted work — locally, regionally and nationally — has been driven by groups of individuals from multiple academic units and other programs across UMKC and the UM System,” Luppino says. “Several external organizations and networks also recognize that law is pervasive and should be represented in entrepreneurial teams.”
Having the law school’s entrepreneurship and innovation programs organized under the CLEI, he says, provides a structure to help sustain and grow them as value-adding resources for generations to come.
“We’re teaching law students to function well in teams that are delivering education and service,” Luppino says. “Whether that’s helping people start businesses, deal with the benefits and risks of new technology or figure out how to navigate laws implicated by innovative initiatives, both students and faculty are contributing to the public good. We’re not in a silo.”
The CLEI obtained a portion of the $12.97 million grant UMKC received from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in January 2023. The law school will obtain a portion of this grant during the next five years. The historic grant supports a variety of efforts at UMKC that further the Kauffman Foundation’s mission of reducing barriers to entrepreneurship, especially among underserved groups.
Among the programs now under the CLEI is the Entrepreneurial Legal Services Clinic, which has provided low-income entrepreneurs with free legal services for two decades. As with several other CLEI programs, this initiative was launched with support from the Kauffman Foundation. Since 2002, the clinic’s student lawyers, supervised by law school faculty, have advised some 2,500 clients — both small businesses and nonprofit organizations — providing some $3.75 million worth of pro bono legal services.
“We're teaching law students to function well in teams that are delivering education and service ... both students and faculty are contributing to the public good."
Anthony Luppino, professor
“I cannot drive more than three miles from my office in any direction and not see a business that we had a hand in assisting to create,” says the clinic’s director and clinical professor Danielle Merrick, J.D., LL.M. “That is anything from a one-owner barbershop to a yoga studio to a full-fledged restaurant to a tech center to nonprofits serving the homeless or veterans.”
The clinic helps clients set up the legal structures they need to open their doors in the first place. It also advises them on contracts, licensing and intellectual property issues, like copyrights, trademarks and a host of other issues that might be barriers to getting started, if legal help weren’t available. Law students who enroll in the clinic each semester get hands-on legal experience with Merrick’s supervision, while the organizations the clinic serves receive invaluable legal counsel.
Nicola Price, owner and president of B2BC Mobile Tax & Solutions, an accounting firm in Waldo, says the free help she got from the clinic drafting organizational documents and other contracts was key to starting her company in 2015.
“I wouldn’t have been able to afford an attorney,” Price says.
She knows she would have probably made mistakes had she tried to do the work herself.
“It would have been more costly to fix them,” she says.
Merrick sees a lot of benefits to the clinic being pulled into the new CLEI. She expects more exposure both on a regional and national basis, so more potential clients will learn about the services the clinic provides. In addition, she hopes to make additional connections in the local legal community, inspiring more practicing attorneys in the region to provide pro bono services to underserved entrepreneurs.
Under the CLEI, the clinic will continue to work with other business clinics at law schools around the country, including continuing to connect them through EshipLaw (eshiplaw.org) and listserv, which the law school administers. Merrick hopes the CLEI will attract additional sources of funding to support the clinic’s work, which is in great demand. Often, clients wait nine months to be seen.
The law school’s programs related to technology, which have regional and national reach, also now fall under the CLEI umbrella. These include classes that prepare law students to best use technology in their legal practices, and programs designed to automate certain legal processes, in order to improve access to justice.
For example, the law school has worked with jurisdictions in Kansas to automate the process of seeking an Order of Protection, making it vastly more efficient and widely available. In the three years since the program launched, it has reduced the time needed to file certain petitions from eight hours to 45 minutes. Today, the majority of all protection orders in the state are filed through this system.
Ayyoub Ajmi, J.D., the law school’s director of legal innovations and technology, sees the new CLEI as a boost for technology-related programs, which have growing relevance in the legal profession.
“We are trying to prepare students, so they are ready for the future of the law — not just with typical representation in court, but also prepared to use technology,” Ajmi says.
Instead of shuffling through piles of cases that are all virtually the same, he wants future lawyers to put systems in place to automate routine cases so they can focus on the more complex ones.
“Through the center, we can really focus our efforts,” Ajmi says. “We are really interdisciplinary and open to cooperation.”