History
The Startup Legal Garage, is an innovative program in which law students provide legal work for early stage Tech and BioTech startups. The work is supervised for free by outside law firms, while the professors teach accompanying doctrinal and skills classes. Every year our students and supervising attorneys take on about 50-60 projects.
Most of Startup Legal Garage’s companies come through the program's partnerships with numerous incubators and accelerators, including QB3 (the incubator for UCSF, UC Berkeley, and UC Santa Cruz),Y Combinator, Cyclotron Road, Tech Futures Group, UC Merced Venture Fund, HustleFund, Stanford Business School, Hackers/Founders, Women 2.0, and Black Founders, and others. SLG innovative and community-serving programming has been repeatedly recognized: SLG received one of the inaugural "Innovator Awards" from the American Lawyer publications, was honored by the Association of American Law Schools as one of its "Innovative & Other Outstanding Programs," won the 2021 L.A. Times In-House Counsel of the Year in the Education and Non-Profit Category, earned the American Bar Association’s Business Law Section National Public Service Award and the California Lawyers Association’s Wiley W. Manuel Pro Bono Certificate, and has been featured in the American Bar Association Journal and other news outlets.
Startup Legal Garage was founded in 2010 by Professor Robin Feldman. Professor Paul Belonick serves as Director.
Get in touch
The Startup Legal Garage understands that getting off the "wet bar napkin" can be a confusing and exciting time. The attorneys we work with can answer some of those burning questions.
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Our Team
Paul Belonick
director of the startup legal garage
Paul Belonick, ESQ.
Prof. Belonick manages the Startup Legal Garage. He graduated from the University of Virginia School of Law in 2010, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Virginia Law Review. He has practiced at both small and internationally-recognized firms, in areas ranging from criminal and family law to mass torts and securities and business litigation. He also holds a doctorate in History from the University of Virginia.
Education
University of Virginia School of Law
Juris Doctor, 2010
University of Virginia
Ph.D., History, 2016
Hamilton College
B.A., History and Classical Languages, 2002
Research Interests
Criminal law and Technology
Business Ethics
American Legal History
Emerging Companies
Class Offerings
Startup Legal Garage Patent Module Intellectual Property Survey
Criminal Procedure
Property
Professional Responsibility - Legal Ethics
Robin Feldman
Robin Feldman is the Arthur J. Goldberg Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Innovation at the University of California Hastings. She is an award-winning scholar whose work has been called “absolutely remarkable” and a “must read.” Professor Feldman has published 4 books and more than 50 articles in law journals including at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, as well as in the American Economic Review and the New England Journal of Medicine. Professor Feldman testifies frequently before Congress and federal and state agencies. Her empirical work has been cited by the White House, along with numerous courts and agencies. Professor Feldman participated in the GAO’s report to Congress on AI, the Army Cyber Institute’s threat casting exercise on weaponization of data, and the National Academies of Sciences roundtable on AI and life sciences. In addition to her scholarship, Professor Feldman runs the Startup Legal Garage, which provides free legal work to 60 early-stage technology and life science companies each year and focuses on women entrepreneurs.