Business students call in the law

Students from Northumbria’s Entrepreneurial Business Management (EBM) course and Northumbria’s award-winning Student Law Office have joined forces to share skills and promote enterprise opportunities.

The two groups held a Generator Session whereby all the students worked collaboratively in teams to enhance their learning experiences.

Newcastle Business School’s pioneering EMB course involves students setting up and running their own limited companies. The Student Law Office provides pro-bono legal assistance for businesses, community groups and members of the public and has a global reputation for clinical legal education. In 2013 Northumbria was awarded the highly coveted Queen’s Anniversary Prize for  Higher and Further Education for the outstanding community work of the Student Law Office.

Lucy Hatt, EBM Programme Leader, and Victoria Gleason, Student Law Office Module Leader, organised a collaborative session where final year law students were assigned an EBM team to work with. Each team, composed of both EBM and law students, then worked together on problems and opportunities sourced from the EBM students’ business projects. 

The law students were able to gain an understanding of the commercial issues facing the business projects whilst highlighting to the EBM students any areas which might merit closer consideration from a legal perspective. Later in the session, the focus moved to collaborative working between EBM teams, as each EBM group came up with an issue or opportunity facing one of their business projects, which was then set as a challenge to another team.

Generator Sessions run four times a year for all EBM students.  They offer a chance to show off key strengths, network across the programme, showcase learning, and to apply learning to real business situations.  It is a combination of brainstorming, problem solving and presenting.

Problems and opportunities addressed included:

• Marketing a consultancy service and improving the efficiency of the sales process.
• Distribution channels for a clothing business.
• Communicating a product concept.
• Legal issues such as contracting, liability and intellectual property.

The business students found the contribution of the law students really valuable, with one commenting “Today was really fun as well as informative.  I feel like I learnt a lot from the law students, as well as learning more about each other.” 

One of the law students added “Everyone seemed to benefit from this session, both business and law students. It helped us consider different issues which may arise when dealing with a business”.

By promoting cooperation between students on different programmes, the Generator Session has been a success in terms of breaking down barriers between academic subjects. Victoria Gleason commented, “Sessions like this are important for emphasising to students that in the real world there is often a lot of overlap between disciplines, this is especially true for business and law where neither can be fully understood without reference to the other.”  The Generator Session, the Student Law Office and the EBM programme highlight Northumbria’s innovative approach to professional and business-focused teaching and learning excellence.