Commonwealth Commercialization Center (C3) has launched C3 Legal to facilitate access to expanded and affordable legal services for Kentucky startups, while helping the state’s law students and practicing attorneys improve their skills and grow their professional networks, the C3 board of directors announced.
C3 Legal brings together Kentucky law schools, state and local bar associations, law firms, entrepreneurs, and industry to drive the program’s three core functions, which include: facilitating connections between startups that come through C3’s network and high-quality, affordable legal counsel at local Kentucky law firms; providing educational programming for Kentucky lawyers, law students, and entrepreneurs, including opportunities for law students to work alongside practicing attorneys on behalf of startups; and catalyzing statewide entrepreneurial and legal networks to the benefit of Kentucky entrepreneurs, lawyers, students, and the state’s broader entrepreneurial climate.
Amanda Kool
“By mobilizing the right resources from Kentucky’s expansive public university and community college networks, we’re able to connect and leverage entrepreneurial and legal talent across the entire state which is an especially exciting endeavor,” said Amanda Kool, who was recently hired as director of legal operations for C3, in a release announcing the new initiative. “By building a network that is truly statewide, C3 Legal will position Kentucky as an innovative, national model for pairing high-quality, affordable legal services provided by local law firms with startups and the provision of career support and education for attorneys who represent them.”
Fueled by KY Innovation and led by the University of Kentucky and University of Louisville in partnership with all of Kentucky’s public institutions, C3 provides resources to universities and colleges across the state. Faculty and students will have access to shared services including identification, development, marketing and protection of intellectual property, increased industry engagement and student experiential learning and workforce development. The program also fosters interstate collaboration to form a regional commercialization corridor. C3 is funded in part by a $1.2 million grant from the Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development through KY Innovation.
“C3 represents our recognition that commercializing high-growth startups is vital to Kentucky’s future as we maximize an exciting new set of resources for the entire state,” said Brian Mefford, executive director of KY Innovation and interim-CEO of C3. “Access to affordable, quality legal services for entrepreneurs and startups in Kentucky and many other states have long lagged behind places like Boston, where startup activity is denser. Although that has been to our detriment, C3 Legal will be both an invaluable tool for business founders and a potential model for states across the nation.”
As director of legal operations, Kool works closely with C3’s staff and board of directors to align the development of C3 Legal operations with the other emerging components of the multi-faceted C3 model. Her work at C3 follows her work on the Legal Needs Assessment for Kentucky Entrepreneurs, which compiles data from more than 130 Kentucky entrepreneurs, lawyers, technical assistance providers, funders, and other stakeholders in the state’s entrepreneurial ecosystem to highlight the myriad gaps and barriers to legal resources for entrepreneurs and devises tailored, multi-faceted solutions to address those needs. The Legal Needs Assessment was published by the Kentucky Bar Association in January.
“C3 Legal and Amanda will be crucial to C3’s overall goals of increasing the amount of viable IP commercialized from our universities, but also facilitating protection and expert guidance to the early stage entrepreneurs we work with,” said Ian McClure, director of UK’s Office of Technology Commercialization and a C3 board member. “Amanda has been a leader in understanding and providing the unique suite of services entrepreneurs need, taken from her experience providing the same type of services in one of the most active startup ecosystems in the world.”
Kool returns to her home state after over a decade in Boston, where she attended law school and practiced in the corporate and global finance practice groups at Nixon Peabody LLP. She then spent five years as a lecturer at Harvard Law School, where she also served as director of Harvard Law’s Community Enterprise Project (CEP), through which upper-level law students represented startups and other clients with a broad range of transactional legal needs under the supervision of licensed attorneys. CEP also engaged in ecosystem-level partnerships that addressed systemic legal needs of entrepreneurs.
On April 3, following three months of preliminary conversations with many stakeholders in Kentucky’s startup legal community, C3 Legal brought together leaders from Kentucky’s private bar, law schools, bar associations, industry, and government to discuss collective opportunities and build consensus around the C3 Legal model. Participants at the C3 Legal Summit identified opportunities for growth and collaboration across the state, including the development and adoption of template documents to reduce transaction costs for lawyers and their startup clients, strategies to reach entrepreneurs and lawyers from rural parts of the state and with other barriers to engagement in entrepreneurship, and room for collaboration among the state’s three law schools to increase student educational opportunities and pathways to startup legal practice.
“The C3 Legal Summit was an excellent and very productive meeting,” said C3 Legal Summit attendee Bill Strench, a partner at Frost Brown Todd who works extensively with startups. “The concepts and proposals that resulted from the interaction of the participants promise to improve our firm’s abilities to connect to entrepreneurs and provide affordable and timely legal services to those clients while also maintaining profitability.”