Delighted to have your visit, Brett. Lyman Johnson at W&L is setting up something similar, though one professor teaches it exclusively, I think, and you may be able to have lunch with him about it when he's at St Thomas.

And maybe they were considering something like this at Colorado? Not sure what happened there, though.

I took a very similar course as a 2L called "Legal Aspects of Startups". It wasn't a 'capstone' per se, but it was geared towards those same critical stages for startup ventures. It was a brand new class at my school, so there was a lot of exploration and wrangling of details.

Overall, it was a really great class, full of valuable information, and a whole lot of fun. A couple of things to watch out for, based on my experiences...

1. Don't deal with venture financing at all. Many of the students were *extremely* interested in this aspect of the course, but it can quickly consume time at the expense of other areas. Besides, you aren't going to *really* be able to cover VC/PE adequately in a 6 week section of one course... if you want to tackle those issues, make it a separate course.

2. Same goes for public offerings. Seriously, scope creep...

3. Focus on real entities that _real world_ small business owners deal with forming. Deal with family owned businesses. Only so many students are going to end up taking companies public. The rest are going to have to form entities for Mom-and-Pop Dream Restaurant.

4. Don't skimp on the employment law issues. Not glamorous stuff. Very useful, though.

5. "Start Up" seems to connote "high tech" which is all well and good... and IP licensing is all hot and sexy (well, to some of us). But startups come in all shapes, sizes and *types*... they aren't all Web 2.0 Facebook Myspaces. I'm sure you know that, but (at least in my class) everyone wanted teh sexy, but the reality is small retail, service based, or restaurant based startups are the vast majority out there... and those that are likely to be encountered by students coming out of school.

Sure, we'd all like to work for Wilson Sonsini (okay... maybe that's just me) but many of us will--for better or worse--end up at Dewey Cheatham and Howe. One of the most frustrating things I experienced in law school was the failure to acknowledge that not all clients present interesting, sexy work... or the filp-side, the perception that just because the perspective client coming off the street wants to start a Doggy Day Care instead of a new web company that they can't be interesting and fun clients.

UCLA has been offering those type of capstone courses as a requirement of its business law specialization for more than 10 years. There are a whole series of what are called transactional skills courses, including public offerings, venture capital, complex financing transactions, deals, mergers and acquisitions transactions. They sometimes are taught by groups of adjuncts covering different subject matter and sometimes permanent faculty in law and management team teach. They have simulation components and drafting or negotiation exercises.