In recent years, the number of people in the United States starting a small business has skyrocketed. That makes sense, says Lynnise E. Pantin, Pritzker Pucker Family Clinical Professor of Transactional Law and director of the Columbia Law School Entrepreneurship and Community Development Clinic. “The story of the self-made man is woven into the fabric of our country. . . . That idea of entrepreneurship and being your own person, being your own man, being your own woman, and owning your own business—that’s embedded in our culture,” she says.
According to the U.S. Small Business Administration’s 2021 Small Business Profile report, small businesses now account for 99.9% of all businesses in the country and were responsible for a net increase of 466,607 jobs to the nation’s economy between March 2019 and March 2020.
A Legal Toolkit for Starting and Scaling Your Business, the online course offered through Columbia Law School’s Executive Education and Non-Degree Program, is designed for small business owners, freelancers, creatives, podcasters, influencers, and anyone else who wants to launch a business in this growing market. Pantin, who teaches the course, draws on her years of experience to provide students with a firmer grasp on navigating the legal challenges of entrepreneurship and managing and protecting a business.
A Legal Teaching Career Focused on Entrepreneurs
Pantin specializes in clinical legal education, entrepreneurship, economic justice, and corporate and business law. After earning a J.D. from Columbia Law School in 2003, she spent seven years working for a corporate law firm, where she also represented many nonprofit organizations “sort of on a pro bono basis,” Pantin says. “I was getting experience in high-level corporate work, but I was also getting experience in the nonprofit world.”
Pantin left the law firm while pregnant with her first child. After taking some time to consider her next career step, and reflecting on some time she had spent teaching before law school, she decided to teach again.
At New York Law School, Pantin worked with entrepreneurs as part of a class she taught focused on nonprofits. “I really liked working with entrepreneurs, and I felt a lot of value in supporting projects, particularly for people who were moonlighting, looking to change their lives, or change their economic circumstances,” she says. She co-founded the Transactional Law Clinic and directed the Social Entrepreneurship Initiative of the Impact Center for Public Interest Law at New York Law School and later founded the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Clinic at Boston College Law School. She also began writing about entrepreneurship and economic justice and became interested in tech startups.
“The idea of giving people the opportunity to access entrepreneurship and to democratize it and giving people more information so that this space isn’t so exclusive—that has become a real passion of mine,” she says.
In 2019, Pantin joined the Columbia Law School faculty and founded the Columbia Law School Entrepreneurship and Community Development Clinic, which offers legal assistance to entrepreneurs to aid in the successful launch of their business. Since then, Pantin estimates that the clinic has helped about 300 entrepreneurs.
The Challenges and Changing Landscape of Entrepreneurship
Pantin says the biggest challenges entrepreneurs face involve accessing the capital and the information they need to successfully launch a business. These kinds of struggles can especially affect minority entrepreneurs—and one of the goals of the certificate program is to support individuals who have fewer resources.
In an article in ColorLines, Pantin writes that she sees firsthand “how entrepreneurs of color with great ideas, hustle, grit, and actual products struggle to find mentorship and financing for their ventures. Quite simply, these talented, ambitious entrepreneurs do not have the same access to capital as their White counterparts.”
She also identifies statistics from federal data in the article. For example, in 2016 women founders of color represented only 3% of all U.S.-backed angel deals; men of color made up 25%. In 2017, only 16 Black women-led companies raised over a million dollars in venture capital funding, and Black women represent just .0006% of the $424.7 billion in total venture funding raised since 2009.
But despite the challenges of starting a business and the need for greater representation among business owners, the changing landscape of entrepreneurship has also led to new opportunities, including, Pantin says, via the internet.
“We’re at a place where we are changing how companies, organizations, and people can access their customers, and there are so many ways to be a business owner,” she says. “An influencer, for example, is a business, and the influencer industry is a multimillion —if not multibillion—dollar industry in this country. Social media generally is just accessing entrepreneurship in a new way.”
Whether someone is selling a service or a product, Pantin says, the internet has made it easier for entrepreneurs to connect with clients and consumers, and, in some industries, for people to launch businesses.
That’s helpful, since Pantin expects more people than ever will become interested in entrepreneurship in the coming years.
“I would say in the past 10 years you’ve seen a lot of people become incredibly wealthy pursuing entrepreneurship dreams,” says Pantin. “And I think people are saying, ‘Well, I could do that too. Or I want to do that. I want to pursue this,’ and then they expect to have this magnificent payoff at the end. And I think more and more people are seeing that and are interested in taking on that risk.”
Pantin’s Goals and What Students Can Expect in the Program
For Pantin, teaching in the program fulfills a desire to help others. Her work may not get as much fanfare as high-profile prosecutions the main-stream media reports on, for example, but that doesn’t make the efforts of lawyers like her any less important.
“I get excited about demystifying the entrepreneurship process and about giving people information and access to information. One of my goals is to clearly articulate the legal issues entrepreneurs confront and to give as many people as possible access to information and to help explain it in a clear way,” Pantin says.
That is why the certificate program focuses on empowering a community of entrepreneurs and non-legal professionals to navigate law-related hurdles as they start and scale their businesses.
Students will be able to build a network of like-minded entrepreneurs and business owners. Taking a course in entrepreneurship, like this one, she says, is a “really smart and important step to further your business,” especially for students who have not studied this area.
“This program gives students the opportunity to engage with people who are in a similar boat. Students have the ability to talk with each other, network with each other, engage on the issues that are affecting their businesses, and learn from others who are confronting issues with their business,” Pantin says. “I look forward to seeing everyone in class and hearing about their businesses.”