As I prepare for my upcoming office hours meeting with a startup founder, I have been thinking about how I can take what I have learned over the past two and a half years of law school and my short summer of experience working at a corporate and securities boutique in Toronto and apply it to a conversation with a real startup, which is no easy task.

One of the biggest differences I have noticed between studying law and practicing it is the uncertainty involved in the latter. Law school has taught me all about legal principles, frameworks, and analysis. Over the years, I have learned how to identify legal issues, interpret legislation and case law, and construct arguments based on the law. While these skills have given me a strong foundation in understanding the law, knowing the law in theory does not necessarily mean knowing how to apply it to a real client’s situation.

Legal research is one area where I have noticed this distinction particularly clearly. In law school, research problems are often relatively well-defined. You are given a fact pattern, a legal question, or a specific issue, and you work toward an answer. However, in practice, the starting point is often much less clear. Startup founders may not know the plethora of legal problems they need to solve, or even what information a lawyer needs to give sound advice.

This is something I have been keeping in mind while preparing for my office hours session. Rather than trying to convey the view that I already know everything, I want to understand the startup from the founder’s perspective. I want to understand what they are trying to accomplish, where they are in the process of building their company, what challenges they have encountered, and what decisions they are currently making. Most importantly, I want to ensure that the questions I ask will help me identify where legal information could actually be beneficial to the startup.

In thinking ahead to the interview, I also realize that preparing for an interview does not mean preparing for every possible question that could come up. There is only so much I can try to predict before speaking with the founder. Instead, I focused my preparation on researching and trying to understand the startup, familiarizing myself with the relevant areas of law, and thinking critically about the questions I want to ask. From there, I feel like the conversation itself will determine where the research needs to go and what answers the startup needs.

My preparation for this meeting feels like the point where two different parts of my legal education are coming together. The first is my time studying at law school, which has given me the theoretical foundation and analytical skills to recognize and research legal issues. The second is the summer I spent gaining practical experience, which showed me that working with real clients is rarely as straightforward as a law school fact pattern. Practice requires communication, judgment, adaptability, the ability to work through uncertainty, and, arguably most importantly, patience. These are traits that few law school courses can fully provide.

The Startup Law Clinic gives me an opportunity to bring these experiences together. I can draw on what I have learned in the classroom while approaching the conversation with a more practical mindset. Rather than treating the interview as a test of whether I know enough, I see it as an opportunity to practice the process of becoming a lawyer: listening carefully, asking useful questions, identifying a client’s needs, and determining how the law can help address them.

That is what I am most looking forward to about my upcoming office hours. I expect there will be things I know and many things I won’t have an answer for. But that is exactly what I am looking for at this stage in my legal career. Practicing law is not about having every answer before the conversation begins. It is about knowing how to ask the right questions, find the information you need, and translate legal knowledge into something that is actually useful to a client.