From data privacy and information security to environmental law, from healthcare to global commerce and beyond, compliance lawyers work wherever regulated organizations need complex legal, regulatory, and ethical requirements translated into effective systems that protect against legal, reputational, and operational risk. The Compliance Clinic is designed to develop core skills and capacities that are transferable across substantive areas of law and lawyering contexts.
Fieldwork
As a Student-Advocate in this Clinic, you will:
- Lead the Clinic’s work with private-sector, public-sector, and NGO clients/partners across a range of fields and industries
- Learn to run an internal compliance investigation
- Hone skills in research, analysis, writing, fact investigation, interviewing, presentation, counseling, project management, interprofessional collaboration, and client relationship management
- Develop thought leadership on a hot topic in compliance
Coursework
In seminars and problem-solving sessions, we demystify and practice key lawyering skills and discuss ongoing case and project work. We also think about the broader impact of and context for the compliance function, including how legal and regulatory systems support – or fail to support – ethical individual and corporate conduct as well as public policy goals.
The Clinic is a one-semester, six-credit program, with three credits allocated to casework and three credits to seminar. It is a central component of the Risk Management & Compliance concentration, in which JD students explore the impact of legal and regulatory compliance on business operations, legal norms underlying compliance, and the role of ethics in regulatory and compliance practice.
Program Highlights
Compliance Clinic Students have:
- Built and conducted a multidisciplinary tabletop exercise to test a Fortune 500 company’s systems for preventing and responding to sexual harassment and misconduct.
- Collaborated with an NGO to evaluate enforcement of antibribery laws in global forced labor flows.
- Developed an organizational self-assessment and set of best practices for applying compliance approaches to advance workplace racial equity.
- Drafted multiple policies and enterprise-wide codes of conduct for local, national, and global organizations.
- Conducted legal, operational, and reputational risk assessments for a local not-for-profit planning to expand nationwide.
- Evaluated gaps in policies and practices to enable a company to work toward global data privacy certification.
We warmly welcome all applicants and remind students that the School of Law’s Clinics comply with Boston University’s non-discrimination policies. The Clinic works with students and BU’s Office of Disability & Access Services to arrange reasonable accommodations as appropriate.
Faculty
