High calibre postgraduate law students from Queen Mary University of London provide free support to start-ups and entrepreneurs to help them develop their business. The students are supervised by practising lawyers from leading firms who volunteer their time. Businesses get support for free, students develop their skills and network, and volunteers demonstrate their commitment to helping the community.
qLegal students provide free support to start-ups by in the form of:
qLegal provides free preliminary legal advice to start-ups and entrepreneurs on a range of complex legal issues including:
To help raise awareness of legal issues affecting start-ups, entrepreneurs and SMEs, qLegal students deliver workshops and webinars on topical legal and business matters. Along with technical updates, toolkits and other online resources, they bring clarity to important concepts and enable businesses and entrepreneurs to know the right questions to ask.
qLegal students also support budding entrepreneurs by giving tailored workshops and talks busting myths and raising awareness about the law to students in schools, FE colleges and universities.
qLegal runs an externship work placement programme for its students within start-ups and scale-ups in the lawtech, AI and compliance and regulatory sectors in particular. Our students spend time in start-ups to gain first-hand experience in legal and technological services while receiving training on law and business from the qLegal team.
Small groups of students also work on discrete projects for businesses, putting students’ research skills and legal knowledge to good use while making the most of their language skills, cultural awareness (many students are from overseas) and first-hand understanding of their demographic group. Projects include working on Legal Design briefs.
Projects also include outreach activities as students work with our partner organisation, CoachBright, providing one-to-one coaching sessions to secondary school pupils from state schools across the UK.
In addition to our pro bono work, qLegal runs a programme matching leading compliance professionals with students who are interested in this growth sector. The programme includes mentoring, talks and interactive workshops.
There is also an option for students to provide legal advice to clients as part of a credit-bearing module run by qLegal.
2020/2021 has been a year of growth for qLegal. Read more in the qLegal Annual Report 2020-21 [PDF 18,113KB].
Our qLegal Annual Report 2019-20 [PDF 505KB] and Review for last academic year 2018/19 [PDF 3,220KB] also gives details about our impact.
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