Students in the Turner Family Community Enterprise Clinic were immersed in client-centered lawyering during the 2023-24 academic year. Working directly with underserved local entrepreneurs, small businesses, and nonprofits, students learned about their clients and their clients’ goals to provide high-quality, individualized legal services.
Students prepared legal work product that included operating agreements, articles of organization, charters, bylaws, membership agreements, conflict of interest policies, compensation policies, service agreements, resolutions, actions taken on written consent, minutes, and advisory memoranda. Through in-person meetings, virtual meetings, phone calls, and emails, students engaged with their clients directly and repeatedly throughout the semester.
Students often paused in their work to reflect on their clients’ goals to consider how to tailor their conversations, questions, legal research, and drafting to the goals and needs of their clients. Brianna Joyce (JD ’25) explained that she “gained a true appreciation of the legal field as a service profession” through her work in Clinic. Joyce and her client-team partner Eliza Jaén (JD ’24) worked together to help their client form a Tennessee nonprofit corporation to help young parents raise emotionally intelligent children.
Echoing the experience of many students, Joyce noted that she “expected to work hard editing drafts, writing memos, refining language in important transactional documents, and meeting internal and external deadlines. What I didn’t anticipate was just how meaningful our services were going to be to our client, who came to the clinic with both big dreams and a big heart.”
