Cecily Banks

Biography

Cecily Banks is a lecturer and director of the School of Law’s Corporate Counsel Externship Program. Banks joined the faculty in 2017 to launch the law school’s externship program devoted to corporate counsel placements.  Through this program, BU law students train for academic credit in the in-house legal offices of corporations in Boston and beyond.  Banks teaches a connected seminar on the modern role of in-house counsel and on professional development through practice.  Banks will also teach Contract Drafting as part of the law 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 on how to draft, negotiate and analyze business contracts and on how to represent business clients.  To enrich the law school’s transactional skills curriculum, Banks also created a number of programs, including a transactional law speaker series and a “business for lawyers” workshop. In addition, Banks taught as a Professor of Legal Practice, immersed in the first-year legal writing, research, and advocacy curriculum.

Prior to Banks’s law faculty positions, Banks represented business and corporate clients as an attorney in the Litigation Practice Group of the law firm of Hinckley Allen, in both its Providence and Boston offices.  Prior to that, Banks represented business and corporate clients at the law firm of Richards, McGettigan, Reilly & West in Alexandria, Virginia, in 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.