Star­tup Law

Course content

This is a scenario-based course whereby students will be exposed to the various legal and adjacent strategic areas that affect a startup during is lifecycle. It covers areas most startups have to deal with, such as, for example, intellectual property, data protection, raising finance and others using a scenario based approach. It is designed from the perspective of a founder who needs to anticipate legal issues that may be relevant for its startup or team members with an in-house counsel kind of role. Therefore it will require students to be analytical and curious about ambiguity and how to be strategic within such ambiguity.

It will adopt a EU perspective and will be "jurisdiction agnostic" to the extent possible. This means it will not be focusing on specific legal issues arising from a given country's national law, but applying those global connections to local communities where appropriate.

In addition, since tech-based startups are able to address large markets beyond the confines of national boundaries, where possible the focus will be in European and cross-border issues.

The course is designed in a way that makes class attendance extremely important since most of the learning is done either in class or via the preparation that is required. For students to extract maximum value from the course, it thus also requires their commitment to do work outside class be it individually or in groups. By extracting value it is meant both transferable knowledge for outside the classroom as well as maximising the chances of a good grade in the exam.

There has been a perception in the past that this is an easy course. Such perception is erroneous and not borne by exam results. The difficulty and complexity comes not from traditional metrics or sources of complexity as found in other courses, but instead from identifying problems, thinking creatively about and solving them. This is a course where learning by doing trumps learning by reading.