Advanced Filmmaker Legal Clinic Practicum

Catalog description

The Filmmaker Clinic at Cardozo is a transactional legal clinic which provides free legal services to student filmmakers and smaller budget independent and documentary filmmakers. Its purpose is to teach practical lawyering skills such as interviewing, negotiating, and contract-drafting to upper-level JD students and LLMs. The clinic has two components: (1) clinical work on client projects and (2) seminar instruction in legal issues related to independent film production. Students will get hands on experience issue-spotting filmmaker-clients needs and drafting production contracts and other transactional documents under the supervision of the clinic staff. Although both the clinical work and the discussion of topics in the seminar will focus to a certain extent on intellectual property rights issues, other substantive areas, including idea submission, rights of publicity, contract law, and employment law, will be covered as well.