KNOXVILLE, Tenn.– The Knoxville law firm of Woolf, McClane, Bright, Allen & Carpenter, has pledged $115,000 to help establish the Center for Entrepreneurial Law at the University of Tennessee College of Law.
The center will train lawyers to handle business and transactional matters for individual clients and large and small businesses.
The firm’s gift is part of UT’s 21st Century Campaign. The College of Law’s goal is $6 million.
“The University of Tennessee College of Law is important to us,” said Dennis R. McClane, a 1976 UT law graduate and a founding partner of the firm.
“We are extremely pleased to become the first Founder of the Center for Entrepreneurial Law, and we are excited about the College’s plans for the Center. We believe the Center will be on the cutting edge of important developments in legal education, and we are gratified to be a part of it.”
Of the 21 attorneys practicing with Woolf, McClane, Bright, Allen & Carpenter, 16 are UT law graduates. The firm was formed in 1994.
“Business firms tend to see law schools as the places that train the people who sue them,” said Richard S. Wirtz, dean of the UT College of Law. “But there’s another side to the story. The idea behind the Center for Entrepreneurial Law is that good entrepreneurial legal work reduces litigation and promotes good business relationships and economic growth.
“Woolf McClane’s decision to become the first Founder of the Center for Entrepreneurial Law is a wonderful development for us. It associates one of the state’s premier law firms with this law school and its programs. And it provides us with funds to carry out an original and highly promising project that has the potential for national recognition.”
Law campaign gifts support the centers for advocacy and
entrepreneurial law, fund professorships and student scholarships, and expand the services of the legal clinic and the law library. Gift funds also provide for state-of-the-art legal and technological resources in the new law building, now under construction, Wirtz said.
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Contact: R.G. Smithson (423-974-0687)