Cecily Banks Joins BU Law as Director of Corporate Counsel Externship Program
Banks brings extensive experience leading experiential-education programs and representing business and corporate clients.
Boston University School of Law is pleased to welcome Cecily Banks as a lecturer and director of the School’s Corporate Counsel Externship Program. Banks joins the faculty to launch the new externship program devoted to corporate counsel placements in for profit and nonprofit corporations.
Through the Corporate Counsel Externship Program, BU Law students will have the opportunity to train—for academic credit—in the in-house legal offices of corporations in Boston and beyond. Banks will teach a connected seminar on the modern role of in-house counsel and on professional development through practice. She will also teach Contract Drafting as part of the School’s Transactional Law Program.
Banks comes to this role after 15 years as a faculty member at Roger Williams University School of Law in Bristol, Rhode Island. While there, she created, launched and directed the law school’s first Corporate Counsel Clinical Externship Program and oversaw its growth through generous training partnerships with corporate counsel and through increasing student demand for these experiences. She also served as a professor of experiential education and taught Contract Drafting and Transactional Lawyering, teaching students the foundations of how to draft, negotiate, and analyze business contracts and how to represent business clients. Banks created a number of programs designed to enrich the law school’s transactional skills curriculum, including a transactional law speaker series and a “business for lawyers” workshop. In addition, she served as a professor of legal practice for the first-year legal writing, research, and advocacy curriculum.
Prior to Banks’s law faculty positions, she represented business and corporate clients as an attorney in the litigation practice group in the Providence and Boston offices of Hinckley Allen. She has also represented business and corporate clients for Richards, McGettigan, Reilly & West, working on commercial litigation matters in the state and federal courts in Virginia, as well as in establishing business entities, and negotiating and advising on commercial leases, all in a wide variety of industries.
Banks is a long-time volunteer to support the social justice and public interest missions of legal education and within the practice of law.
“I am excited to build a program that offers an array of meaningful training partnerships between BU Law students and the highly talented and generous in-house counsel who guide companies every day,” Banks says. “These in-house experiences are particularly important for law students interested in representing business clients. The students not only see up close how law is practiced on a daily basis for the internal corporate client, but they also learn the client’s business and a legal counsel’s role within the strategic business landscape of the company. This training is vital to teach law students how to add value for a client from day one as a lawyer.”
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