New program to give IU Maurer students deeper venture capital experience

When the Indiana University Maurer School of Law helps launch the IU x Trades District Innovation Associates Program this fall, its creators hope it will mark a milestone in interdisciplinary legal education—not just at IU, but potentially nationwide.

The program is a joint venture between Maurer, IU’s Kelley School of Business, IU Ventures, and the city of Bloomington’s Trades District, a downtown entrepreneurship hub and incubator.

It’s designed to immerse graduate students—two from Maurer and two from Kelley in the pilot year—in the fast-evolving world of venture capital, scalable startups, and legal innovation. For Maurer students, it’s a rare opportunity to apply transactional legal skills in a real-world setting shaped by entrepreneurship and investment.

Creating IU grads with training in both the law and venture capital could also pay big dividends for southern Indiana, according to John Fernandez, CEO of The Mill (a centerpiece of the downtown Trades District) and former Bloomington mayor.

“It’s essential that we retain and attract talent,” Fernandez said. “Having talented legal professionals who really understand what’s required to support growth-stage and early-stage companies is an important part of the talent base. It helps us attract and retain entrepreneurs.”

Seed planted in the Trades District

The program is being seeded with funding from IU’s Office of the Vice President for University Relations. The idea is to cultivate and retain high-potential, venture-minded talent by embedding students in the Trades District, which includes The Mill, IU Innovates, and IU Ventures in its boundaries.

Originally the program was to be built up in takes, but the recent infusion of cash allowed for a slate of new projects to be launched all at once. (The funder isn’t ready to publicly announce its support or the amount of funding it is providing.)

“We are being given the ability to ramp up the initiation of the program more quickly than we anticipated,” said Mark Need, the program’s director as well as clinical professor of law at Maurer, director of the Elmore Entrepreneurship Law Clinic, and venture legal analyst in residence at IU Ventures. “Some of these things were a bit of a wish list. But because of the money, we get to offer this opportunity across the board to these students right out in the first year.”

The program builds on the foundation of the IU Ventures Fellows program, which provided practical venture capital experience to students across several IU schools, including Maurer. In its new form, the program is narrower—focusing initially on just Maurer and Kelley—but also deeper and more robust, with an emphasis on outcomes, economic growth, and talent retention.

A venture lab for law students

For Maurer School of Law students, the program will deliver a suite of hands-on experiences through summer internships, legal-tech hackathons, interdisciplinary venture competitions, and consulting projects with startups in the IU Ventures portfolio of nascent businesses.

Associates from the law school will intern at the Elmore Entrepreneurship Law Clinic, which Need directs. Located within the Trades District’s Dimension Mill, the clinic will, for the first time, offer services year-round.

“The clinic, which historically has not accepted clients over the summer, will now have the capacity to continue legal services to Trades District and IU Innovates startups year-round,” he said.

From Need’s perspective, it’s about more than simply offering students something new. It’s about showing them that the practice of law can reach far beyond traditional litigation or courtroom advocacy.

“We get to be part of teams that are building things,” he said. “If you’re not interested in litigation or it feels too adversarial, here’s a way to use your superpowers for good. This is another use of one’s skills that isn’t always apparent to students when they get to law school.”

Students will also receive tuition sponsorship to attend Berkeley’s VC University, the nation’s leading online certification program in venture capital. They’ll participate in the invite-only Venture Capital Investment Competition, and engage with practicing investors in the field.

“These are real natural feeders,” Need said. “We have a JD/MBA program. A lot of our family office students have decided to do the JD/MBA after they’re here, and I expect a lot of our VC program students to do the same.”

More than legal education

What makes the new program unique is not just its interdisciplinary nature, but the scope of the experiences it offers. Students won’t merely shadow venture capitalists. They’ll actually do the real-world work.

“VCs can come from law, and VCs can come from the business school,” Need said. “So it’s helpful when the ecosystem at IU and Bloomington is really playing as well together as it has in the 20 years I’ve been here.”

That ecosystem includes an ever-growing list of innovation assets: IU Innovates, the Elmore Clinic, Kelley’s entrepreneurship programs, and the city-supported Trades District. One of the program’s hallmarks is that it deliberately positions Maurer students within that network, encouraging collaboration across disciplines and also between campus and community.

In fact, one of the more novel aspects of the program is a startup residency track that will give selected recent graduates subsidized co-working space, mentorships, and small grants to launch businesses from Bloomington.

“These are collaborative spaces where people work together and learn from one another,” Need said. “And the more people who have success because of that collaboration, the more people stick around. Then the bigger the collaboration grows.”

Building a pipeline

For Need, a JD/MBA alum himself, the program’s mission is as much about student outcomes as it is about regional development. He sees the program as a way to give Maurer students a tangible edge in the competitive world of transactional law.

“The best kinds of programs, depending on your definition of best, are programs that a practitioner like me can look at and say, ‘I wish they would’ve had that when I was in law school,’” he said. “That’s what recruiters get excited about.”

Students who complete the program may not all become venture capitalists, but Need believes they will walk away with a deeply practical understanding of how to assess, structure, and support complex business transactions. Those skills can translate directly into fields like private equity, family office law, and even legal tech entrepreneurship.

“The reality is whether you’re learning about family office, private equity, investment banking or venture capital, you’re learning the same suite of portable skills around identifying risks, building transactions, and thinking about drafting for strategic purposes,” Need said.

An academic first?

Need believes Maurer is in rare company—possibly even alone—in helping to launch such a program. Typically, other such efforts have sprung exclusively from business schools.

“There’s no doubt that there are strong venture capital programs at other universities,” he said. “But they are largely housed in and originate at business schools. I know of no law schools that have a program anything like this.”

Even if the program isn’t unique, its combination of legal education, startup experience, and VC exposure is certainly uncommon. And it might just give Maurer a recruiting edge.

“Our goal is to distinguish Maurer a little bit,” Need said. “We want a student who might be considering one of our main competitor law schools—or maybe even a slightly higher-ranked law school—to say, ‘Yeah, but I have this opportunity at Maurer and it doesn’t exist anywhere else.’”

Looking ahead

Though the program’s first cohort will be small—just two law students and two MBA students—Need hopes to eventually expand the program to eight or 10 students per year, many of them dual JD/MBA candidates.

“My best case scenario is 30 to 40 students with a high percentage of them pursuing the JD/MBA,” he said.

For Bloomington, the program could help anchor high-potential students and startups in the local economy. For Maurer, it deepens the school’s already substantial offerings in transactional and entrepreneurial law. And for law students, it’s an invitation to view their degrees not as passports to the courtroom, but as toolkits for building the Next Big Thing.

“This isn’t about Maurer leading the way for all the exciting things that are happening in startups and Bloomington and IU,” Need said. “It’s that Maurer gets to be a part of that.”

Fernandez said The Mill is always focused on what it can do to support the next group of entrepreneurs who are going to create businesses, jobs and wealth in the community.

“Having the fellowship program that Mark’s program provides is just another strong component of that infrastructure we’re building,” Fernandez said.•