Why I Want to Direct the Startup Legal Garage

I. The Ground Is Moving

The Startup Legal Garage serves clients who are building companies at the edge of transformation. That edge, right now, is artificial intelligence dissolving the boundaries that defined startup law for the last half-century.

Entity formation when AI agents can perform work that previously required hiring a team. IP strategy when the most valuable asset a company produces might be synthetic. Employment structures when the line between employee and tool blurs. Equity arrangements when contribution cannot be measured by hours or headcount. These are not hypothetical questions for fall 2026—they are the questions SLG's clients are encountering this year.

The legal frameworks that governed the startup economy were built for a world of scarcity: scarce capital, scarce talent, scarce cognitive capacity. Those frameworks are becoming vestigial. What replaces them will not be discovered in advance by scholars or regulators. It will emerge from practice—from lawyers and clients working through these questions together, case by case, in real time.

That emergence is what the Startup Legal Garage can become. Not a clinic that trains students to execute established transactional patterns, but a program that teaches them to find the law when the map runs out.

II. The Promise

On May 11, 2001, Egyptian State Security Police raided a floating nightclub on the Nile called the Queen Boat. I was there. An officer clasped my arm to arrest me, then released it when I said I was American. My friend Mahmoud disappeared into the system. Fifty-two men were prosecuted for "debauchery." I walked away.

I was afraid. I let my friend disappear without standing up. And I made myself a promise: if I were ever granted the chance to stand up to injustice again—because, really, how often does that opportunity arise?—then I would.

That promise structured everything that followed. I went to law school. I became a federal criminal defense lawyer. I defended people facing execution, people charged with terrorism, people accused of being enemies of the state. I stood up to federal judges when they violated my clients' Sixth Amendment rights. I got terminated from the CJA panel. I had $85,000 worth of work withheld. I documented systemic constitutional violations across 700 pages and published it. I knew what it would cost and I did it anyway.

And then I went to Public Counsel and built something different. I took over an appellate clinic that had focused on triage and single-task assistance and transformed it into a model for intelligence democratization. We moved from giving a fish to teaching how to fish—training self-represented litigants across virtually any type of civil matter to use AI to represent themselves. We are giving them competencies the profession said they could never have, and the promise of what we're seeing is remarkable.

I want to direct the Startup Legal Garage because it is the next iteration of that same commitment. Startups exist at the edge of transformation, where established rules don't reach. Teaching law students to serve clients at that edge isn't about transactional mechanics. It's about judgment when the institutions haven't caught up. It's about standing in the gap.

III. What the Program Becomes

The pedagogy I would build is not theoretical. I have already done it twice: once at Public Counsel with the appellate clinic, and now at UC Law SF with the AI bootcamp I'm teaching this semester.

Students learn transactional competencies—entity formation, employment agreements, IP licensing, equity structures—by serving real startup clients through the clinic. That is table stakes. But they also learn something harder: how to advise a client when the legal framework is indeterminate. How to reason through novel problems without precedent. How to use AI as a professional competency rather than a shortcut. How to recognize when the rules are changing underneath you and what that means for your duty to the client.

The bootcamp I'm teaching now demonstrates that this pedagogy scales. We are training law students to use AI tools not as research assistants but as cognitive partners—teaching them to work with artificial intelligence rather than merely operate it. That same integration happens in the clinic. Students advise startup clients on questions that require both human judgment and AI-enabled analysis. They learn to navigate the edge.

The Startup Legal Garage, the AI Law & Innovation Institute, and the bootcamp should not be parallel programs. They should be a unified ecosystem within the Center for Innovation. Students move between them fluidly. Clinic work informs the doctrinal course. Bootcamp skills become clinic competencies. The research questions that emerge from client work feed back into the Institute. The whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts—which is, not coincidentally, the same superadditive dynamic that the Emerging Law framework describes.

This is not a vision document. It is a description of what I have already started building and what I would continue to build if given the opportunity. I want this position because it is where the work I have been doing for the last twenty-five years—since that promise in Cairo—finally coheres. At my own school. Inside the Center for Innovation. Training the next generation of lawyers to serve clients at the edge of transformation.

That is why I am applying. That is what I would build. That is the work.