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About Us

Generally

The Organizations and Transactions Clinic is part of the Mills Legal Clinic at Stanford Law School. The clinic provides free corporate legal services to established Northern California and other nonprofit organizations. The clinic is targeted at students planning to do M&A, finance, securities, technology or other corporate or transactional work at major firms as well as those seeking to explore a non-litigation, advisory-oriented practice.

Clinic students

Clinic students are in their second or third years at the law school. The clinic is an academic course and a full-time commitment. It represents the students’ entire courseload during the quarter. Students work in teams in close collaboration with the instructors.

Clinic instructor

Michelle Sonu, Associate Director and Lecturer in Law, is a graduate of MIT and Harvard Law School. She practiced at Cooley LLP, where she focused on acquisitions and corporate matters for technology and life science companies. Sonu’s research has focused on fiscal sponsorship, transactional clinic design, and on how law school clinics might be useful models and sources of ideas for law firm professional development and associate training programs.

Contact information

Organizations and Transactions Clinic
Stanford Law School
559 Nathan Abbott Way
Stanford, CA 94305-8610

Michelle Sonu
email: msonu@law.stanford.edu
tel: 650-723-1065

Mills Legal Clinic

Founded in 2005, the Mills Legal Clinic is a vital part of Stanford Law School’s mission to prepare every student for the challenges, responsibilities and rewards of a career as a legal professional. Providing individualized, hands-on learning opportunities, this intensive training ground shapes future lawyers of every career aspiration, whether they choose to work in a large firm, become entrepreneurs, make policy or engage in full-time public service. The work done in the Mills Legal Clinic ranges from high-impact litigation to direct-services representation, from broad-based policy initiatives to close work with individuals and organizations—locally, nationally, and abroad.

Acknowledgments

Jay Mitchell, Professor of Law, Emeritus, was the founding director of the Organizations and Transactions Clinic and led the clinic from 2007 until September 2023. Professor Mitchell worked with numerous student teams to develop many of the documents on the site and developed much of the site’s commentary as well.

The Robert Crown Law Library, the information technology department, and the office of communications at Stanford Law School guided and collaborated with the clinic in developing this website. In particular, we are indebted to Alba Holgado and Beth Williams from the library, Jean-Francois Barthe from the IT department, and Jennifer Stroth, Jenny Quan and Joe Banks from communications, for their commitment, creativity, expertise, patience, and plain hard work in building the site. We are also grateful to the lawyers and organizations who’ve made forms and precedents available to us and to the public over the years.

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