BL 404: Capstone - Entrepreneurship Law --- Law provides entrepreneurs with many opportunities for competitive advantage. This course offers an examination of various legal issues every entrepreneur should understand to make good business decisions. This course will address legal concerns that arise when leaving your current employer to start a business, creating an appropriate ownership structure, funding the venture, negotiating and contracting with vendors and customers, assembling your team, and global issues. This course will assist you in your ability to work with legal counsel. This course is a capstone course. You will work on three projects applying your knowledge of legal issues to the context of entrepreneurship. These will include negotiating a contract important to your business, selecting an appropriate business form and demonstrating your understanding of the appropriate practices and documentation, and will culminate in a shark tank presentation whereby you will present your business idea, including a thorough analysis of the relevant legal issues, to convince a panel of investors to fund your project.

BL 411/BUSABRD 411: Cross-cultural Negotiation and Dispute Resolution --- The ability to negotiate effectively is essential to business success, especially in a global economy.  This course emphasizes negotiation strategies and skills that enable managers, functional specialists (for example, in finance, marketing and accounting), consultants, entrepreneurs and others to create and claim value in a manner that enhances long-term business relationships.  Among the specific topics in the course are legal and ethical frameworks for negotiation, psychological tools that enhance negotiation effectiveness, and negotiations strategies for dispute resolution (including the use of third party processes such as mediation and arbitration in resolving business disputes).  Because the course is offered in an international setting, special emphasis is placed on cross-cultural negotiation and dispute resolution.  The travel component of the course will be offered during two weeks in May in Costa Rica.

BL 417: Real Estate in the United States — from the purchase and sale of real property to its ownership, maintenance, management, financing, use, development, and redevelopment—is governed by an at times-complex and even obscure regulatory structure. Yet this regulatory structure is critically important to how every person lives in, works in, and experiences the built and natural environment, every day. This course will introduce students to a variety of legal concepts relating to real estate, including the nature of various types of real property interests, the procedural and substantive elements of real estate transactions, real estate financing mechanisms, land use and development, and landlord-tenant interactions. Although the course will cover legal topics, it will not train students to be lawyers. Instead, the course will train students to recognize legal issues pertaining to real estate, to understand the purpose and function of various aspects of real estate law and the legal elements of real estate transactions, and to know when and how to engage with the various participants—especially lawyers—in conducting the business of real
estate.