Spring 2025
Professor(s):
Layla Lumpkin (ADJUNCT)
Credits: 2
Course Areas: Business and Commercial Law
Time: 5:30p-7:30p W Location: 100
Course Outline: This course is designed to introduce students to the unique challenges entrepreneurs face and related legal considerations. The course approach is practical and will encourage students to think critically about the tension between risk and return when advising start-ups and growth-stage companies. Topics will include preparation for an initial investment, due diligence, entity governance, equity compensation, founders agreements and vesting, intellectual property rights, the fundraising process, basic terms negotiations, convertible debt and future equity instruments, venture capital-style equity investments, and exit transactions. The objective is to introduce students to the legal issues most frequently encountered by high-growth early stage companies, and purchasers of equity in those companies, throughout the fundraising cycles. The course will seek to expose students to the skills transactional lawyers need when advising entrepreneurial ventures and their investors.
Course Syllabus: Syllabus
Course Notes: (Face-to-Face) The UH registration system instruction mode for this course is listed in parenthesis. For this instruction mode, instructors and students are expected to normally be physically present in the classroom. If the course has a final examination, it will be in a classroom requiring your physical presence. Other assessment, such as a mid-term exam, may also be in a classroom. Whether this instructor will offer “remote presence” (starting a zoom meeting from the podium computer to enable student remote access on an occasional basis) for part or all of the semester is not known, but students should not rely on an expectation that remote presence will be available.
Quota=15
Prerequisites:
First Day Assignments:
Final Exam Schedule:
This course will have:
Exam:
Paper:
Satisfies Senior Upper Level Writing Requirement: No
Experiential Course Type: simulation
Bar Course: No
DistanceEd ABA: No
Pass-Fail Student Election: Unavailable (Instructor Preference)
Course Materials
Book(s) Required
Course Materials: Reed & Barron, Entrepreneurship Law: Cases & Materials, Second Edition (Aspen Casebook), 2021 (“Entrepreneurship Law”) (ISBN: 9781454899730); Other materials as provided.
