Impact Law Forum — Cultivating a Legal Community for Social Enterprise

Impact Law Forum (ILF) is an innovative response to the growing interest of the legal community in serving impact entrepreneurs and social enterprise.

Started by Zoe Hunton of Hunton Law and Natalia Thurston of Social Venture Law, the practice group seeks to inform, share resources, build networks, and survey relevant issues, legislation, public policy and case law. 

Impact Law Forum Events

Impact Law Forum has organized two events since its inception in Fall 2012 and has a third planned for Thursday, January 24th 2013. You can Register here.

Upcoming:

• January 24th 2013 Thursday meeting in Palo Alto. Founder of LawGives, Tony Lai will speak about his experience in social enterprise and the goals of LawGives—an online platform to engage and inform attorneys and to make free legal information widely available. Tony is a staff member of StartX (Stanford startup accelerator), was on a teaching team for the new Legal Technology course at Stanford Law School, and completed his LL.M at Stanford in Law, Science, and Technology.

Past Events:

• October 25th 2012 Thursday kickoff meeting in San Francisco. Speakers/hosts Zoe and Natalia provided an overview of the social enterprise sector, the dynamic legal climate serving social entrepreneurs, and a vision for the organization.
• December 6th 2012 Thursday session in San Francisco. Speaker Kate Michi Ettinger, JD, healthcare entrepreneur and social change architect led a workshop on SocEntStrategy, a pilot project to seed a global community of social entrepreneur legal practitioners and to map open issues in social enterprise law. The effort was launched in Spring 2012. Kate is also on the ILF board.

What Inspires Impact Law

When asking co-creators of ILF Zoe and Natalia about how they envision Impact Law Forum, here’s what they had to say.

According to Natalia, a San Francisco-based attorney who leads a law firm specializing in social enterprise issues, “Impact Law Forum is a unique opportunity to engage a community of attorneys to support the growth of social entrepreneurship and build law practices also based on sustainable principles.”

Zoe, whose firm is based in Menlo Park, envisions ILF “building community in a dynamic area of law that is rapidly evolving to keep pace with social entrepreneurs who push the boundaries of what is possible despite limited resources and intense challenges.” She is enthusiastic about being part of a community “working towards social change and justice and consciously shifting the role of the law and lawyers to create a better and more just world.”

The potential for impact + law

There is great potential in moving the conversation of social entrepreneurship law from theory and policy to how it actually applies. Stay tuned for information on updates on the progress of ILF and the 411 on upcoming events.